Praktike's reaction to Daalder's post was mixed. Among the points prak raises, he hits on the topic I promised to write about:
I also think Daalder is missing the Bush administration's shift away from a "global war on terrorism" to a "global war on extremism," which we've been tracking here. In truth, this change in emphasis from a primarily military to a primarily ideological struggle is what Democrats and counterterrorism experts have been talking about for some time. If done properly (always iffy with the Bush administration), it will be a good thing,..
I agree wholeheartedly. Here's a lengthy very-sketchy-first-draft-essay on why I agree with prak, together with some implications from the view of strategic doctrine.
Like praktike, I am somewhat disappointed with Ivo Daalder's opening contribution to Josh Marshall's new policy blogging venture. Criticism of the Bush Administration's specific moves on dealing with terrorism are certainly merited. Where Bush's actions (or non-actions) notably diverge from his political rhetoric, he should be especially fair game for his electoral cynicism and fear-mongering.
But Daalder's critique of Bush as "all hat" on terror is pushing us in a direction we don't really want to go. Or rather, it's inadvertently hanging on to a set of Bush-defined narrow policies when Bush has himself begun to shift towards a strategic approach far more in keeping with policies liberals have long advocated. We should get out in front of that process.
The "Global War on Terrorism" as a flawed strategy
From the outset, the "Global War on Terrorism" was widely derided as a strategic concept by scholars and experienced policymakers both in the US and internationally, and within both the foreign policy and military establishments. As emphasized in the report of the 9/11 Commission and the Defense Advisory Board's recommendations on Public Diplomacy, the GWOT is a distinctly unhelpful way of thinking about the complex phenomena of politico-religious extremism which manifest themselves, in part, through terrorist acts aimed at the US or at US friends and interests. A GWOT provides little strategic guidance for defining objectives or for framing policy options, choosing actions, and assessing the effectiveness of those actions (e.g. Rumsfeld's "metrics" problem).
Immediately following 9/11, the GWOT served as a handy catch-all for a grab-bag of steps initiated in the name of military necessity or protecting the homeland. Many of the conceptual weaknesses inherent in the GWOT as a strategy, which were identified by critics from the outset, have become increasingly apparent over the past three years -- it is not a "war;," the enemy isn't "terrorism;" the stated ends are existential and unlimited; the nature and location of risks is poorly understood; Al Qaeda as "the" threat has been over-estimated; the local/nationalist dimension of the conflict was under-estimated; the dynamic and inter-active relation between US policies and a constantly evolving extremist opposition to those policies has been insufficiently acknowledged; and ends and means are poorly aligned, especially given an over-emphasis on military solutions. An extensive list of problems, but far from exhaustive.
Daalder is certainly correct that, having wrung the maximum number of votes from the electorate in November with their GWOT rhetoric, the Bush Administration has been abandoning the GWOT without fanfare. We on this blog have been tracking the shift in vocabulary from "terrorism" to "extremism" and the vanishing "war" since at least Condi Rice's confirmation hearings in mid-January. I don't, however, agree with Daalder that this means that Bush thinks "we've won the war on terror." Rather, I see this as the beginnings of a welcome but difficult maturation of US policy with which we should engage intellectually.
An emerging strategy of "marginalization"
The broad outlines of a strategy are emerging for dealing with the protracted conflict with politico-religious extremism that the US, and the world more generally, will face over the coming decades. For lack of a better term, it's what I call rather inelegantly a strategic doctrine of "marginalization."
A strategy of marginalization attempts to push to the sidelines of the societies in which they live those forces that present potential threats to the US itself or to a liberal democratic international order more generally. Or looking at the strategy from the other direction: marginalization is accomplished by expanding the "normal" space through greater opportunities for political, economic and social participation. As "normal" space expands, the "enemies" of the US and its friends will be those who continue to self-identify as rejectionists -- groups or movements which refuse to engage in this expanded space, which choose to remain on what will have become the extreme margins. Ultimately, the objective of isolating or marginalizing those who view the US and its friends as the "enemy" and reject participation in their own societies is not to identify, locate and directly destroy them, though that will in certain cases be necessary. The objective, instead, is that those who reject participation be themselves rejected by the societies in which they live.
A long-term approach to combating "extremism" helps us pull together into a more coherent strategy a host of disparate but often connected threats: not only the international networks of Islamist extremists who view the globe as their battleground, but also local groups that are increasingly adopting some extreme Islamist coloring, the "failed states" that were already a major concern prior to 9/11, and various local forms of ethnic or sectarian conflicts, whether they take the form of "liberation" struggles or "ethnic cleansing."
A strategy of marginalization helps us overcome some of the glaring weaknesses of the GWOT as a strategy, especially bringing ends and means into better alignment. Liberals from the outset have emphasized that "defeating terrorism" requires the full toolkit of American policy tools, with military power being only one dimension of a strategic response, and not the most important one. "Marginalization" provides clearer guidance than "defeating terrorism" when we are faced with difficult choices among tools or are forced to make tradeoffs between short-term and long-term costs and benefits.
Any successful strategy must be compatible with most of the competing traditions in American foreign policy. "Marginalization" has the decided advantage that it is positive, outward-looking, progressive, and compatible with a liberal global political economy. It is as much a constructive strategy -- building an expanded "normal" space that pushes extremists to the margins -- as it is a destructive strategy -- eliminating the specific threats to US interests. Bush's recent focus on democratization, when seen as one part of a broader long-term strategy, looks far more sensible than when viewed through the grand rhetoric of freedom versus tyranny. And "marginalization" gives us a standard for navigating the inevitable tradeoffs between pushing for political, economic and social liberalization on the one hand and engaging less-than-savory regimes on the other.
"Marginalization" as "containment" for a new age
A strategy of marginalization is in many ways akin to the Cold War's strategic doctrine of "containment." John Lewis Gaddis' recent appreciation of George Kennan in The New Republic drew a number of lessons for our times from containment as a strategic doctrine. After rejecting "containment" as directly applicable to terrorism, Gaddis offered five principles -- or more accurately observations -- that might be transferable to our thinking today. I won't try to map Gaddis' principles directly to a marginalization strategy. Rather, I'll highlight three of his observations along with some brief comments on how they ought to be reflected in our thinking about strategy going forward.
Gaddis defines the broad strategic objectives of containment as "avoiding the extremes of war and appeasement while waiting for the Soviet Union to change itself." Among its elements that I find readily applicable to our current situation:
- Containment mapped out a path between dangerous -- even deadly -- alternatives. [...] The idea that there could be something in between--neither war nor peace, neither victory nor defeat, neither appeasement nor annihilation had never been clearly articulated.
We may mourn the absence of the clarity of "total victory" in this age of post-modern warfare. But the deliberate strategic choice to manage ambiguity, which was implicit in the "containment" doctrine, is especially important when we are dealing with the asymmetrical nature and "moral dimensions" of combating local counter-insurgencies, global guerrillas and 4thGen warfare.
- [E]nemies should be encouraged to defeat themselves. The idea goes back at least to Sun Tzu. It pervades Clausewitz. It is what Marx and Lenin expected would happen to capitalism
[...]Exploiting contradictions... makes sense in a post-September 11 era, because the interests of terrorists and those of the states that support them are not always the same. Terrorists have no economic program; states in an increasingly interdependent world must have one. Terrorists substitute intimidation for representation, a bargain that has not proved sustainable in a democratizing age. And states seek to survive even if terrorists do not: even rogue states have an interest in preserving the international state system, because they have no way of knowing what might replace it.
A strategy of marginalizing extremism would go somewhat beyond Gaddis' formulation. Marginalization is indeed premised on exploiting potential contradictions, but those contradictions are broader and deeper that those between terrorists and states as actors. A marginalization strategy views not only the international system but also societies defined more broadly as the arenas in which conflict and contradictions will emerge, and it sees non-state players and local institutions -- political, economic, religious, cultural -- as having equal importance as actors along with states and terrorists.
- [O]ne cannot help but be struck by the extent to which the larger objectives of containment... remained the same, regardless of which party occupied the White House and which approach to containment each chose to embrace.
[...] The requirement to hold an election every four years may have made it hard to maintain consistency, but it was a safeguard against complacency, against the compulsion to continue failing strategies in the face of evidence that they were failing.
[...]Nor did shifting approaches to containment impede another kind of accountability, which was the need to combine leadership with consent. It is striking that after four and a half decades of the Cold War, the alliances with which the United States began that contest were largely intact, while the Soviet Union had hardly any allies left. The prospect of something worse than American hegemony helps in part to explain this outcome. It is also the case, though, that the strategists of containment never underestimated the importance of allies. They worked hard to maintain multilateral consent for American leadership in waging the Cold War, without at the same time allowing the need for consultation to paralyze their alliances. Containment in that respect also sets a standard to which future grand strategists--perhaps even current ones--might aspire.
Gaddis is pointing to one of the critical elements of a successful long-term strategy: sustainability. Gaddis' comments about international "consent" are increasingly appreciated by all but the most die-hard of the US nationalists in the Bush Administration. But for our purposes, his comments about a broad domestic consensus on major objectives -- albeit within which bitter partisan battles could be fought about means -- points us toward what should be one of the goals of American "liberal internationalists" and "realists" alike. It is in our mutual interest to develop a strategic framework that could orient policy over the long-haul regardless of who occupies the White House.
- A final lesson from the past that will be usable in the future comes chiefly from Eisenhower, although Kennan agreed with it: it was that containment must not destroy what it was attempting to defend. Eisenhower's concern was that, in the effort to resist an authoritarian adversary, the United States itself might become authoritarian, whether through the imposition of a command economy or through the abridgment of democratic procedures. That never happened. Despite the military-industrial complex, the nation maintained its markets; despite McCarthyism, it sustained and ultimately strengthened civil liberties; despite the excesses of Vietnam and Watergate, the strategy of containment never came close to corrupting fundamental American values. They remained, at the end of the Cold War, what they had been at its beginning. The same can hardly be said of fundamental Marxist-Leninist values. So in this sense, too, containment was consistent with Clausewitz: it was an extension of war, diplomacy, and values by other means.
The American system is starting to re-equilibrate after the initial reactions to 9/11. The checks and balances on the executive by the judiciary and, increasingly, the press and public opinion are beginning to operate. Perhaps not as quickly as we'd like, but they are starting to work. This is one of the requisites of a sustainable marginalization strategy where the "liberal" (small "l") part of the body politic must make a particular contribution.
Dilemmas of Marginalization
In a way, the Bush Administration is now captive of the vocabulary it utilized to take the country to war in Iraq and wage a presidential election campaign. It is now shifting in practice -- and to a lesser extent in words -- towards a strategic framework that could achieve wide bipartisan acceptance. Many of the most vocal opponents to some of the policies implicit in a marginalization strategy will, however, come from those who have been the most avid supporters of the GWOT.
Bringing them in from the cold. The policy area that will be the most contentious is the broad category of what I call "bringing them in from the cold." Groups that have been on the "outs" -- that have been involved in violent conflict, sometimes even using terrorist or ethnic cleansing methods -- must be given incentives to join in the spheres of "normal" participation as those spheres broaden and develop. Those groups or individuals who choose to reject participation are thereby pushed to the extreme margin and become easier to combat directly.
This process has already begun with Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Similar behind-the-scenes attempts have been underway for more than a year to bargain with the less extreme of the various insurgent groups in Iraq. And in every case, any success will be met with shrieks of horror and outrage, especially on the American right: "you can't reward terrorists" or "you can't give amnesty to killers of US troops." Yet no progress is possible -- and the threats of greater instability and more recruits for international terror will increase -- unless the vast majority of the members of these groups join the "normal" political system.
The post-election process in Iraq should remind us that formal democratization steps, such as elections or constitutions, don't magically assure legitimacy of the system and reconciliation of conflicting parties. It takes a long time to give sufficient confidence to conflicting groups to persuade them to give up their weapons. As we've seen in Northern Ireland, marginalizing the "hard boys" takes considerable patience, and like it or not, bargains and incentives must be part of the picture.
Those Americans on the left, who are perhaps more inclined to understand the need to attract "national liberation" groups into a system, may find themselves on the opposite side when it comes to dealing with former members of authoritarian governments, ruling parties, or groups responsible for ethnic cleansing. Yet the core strategic objective -- bringing the majority in from the cold and marginalizing the extremists -- remains the same. We must remember that indictments for war crimes, regardless of the tribunal, are profoundly political steps that will feed into the dynamics of a conflict, and not always in a way that reduces violence or enhances the prospects of reconciliation.
Self-determination. Much has been made of the grand Wilsonian vision of Bush's second inaugural speech. Little has been discussed of the internal contradictions of Wilsonian freedom, most notably the mixed legacy of "self-determination." If I correctly recall my earliest exposure to Wilson in school, after the League of Nations story, we learned about the origin of the verb "to balkanize." At Liberals Against Terrorism, we've discussed with some frequency -- with praktike taking the lead -- the problem that "nationalism" as a source of instability and violence is not dead. And in some ways the interconnectedness of a globalizing world makes it easier for smaller geographic units to realize successfully their ambitions of economic and political separateness. This is such a complex topic that all I can do is flag it as a key dilemma going forward. I expect nationalist conflicts -- both as between states and separatism within states -- to present a major subset of one of the primary challenges to the implementation of a marginalization strategy: walking the tightrope between a strong interest in promoting stability against the need for change in local political and social systems.
There are other potential dilemmas I could note, especially those concerning the roles of the US military -- conducting diplomacy, obtaining intelligence, pursuing terrorists, training friendly militaries, assisting early-stage counterinsurgencies, providing security commitments, maintaining overseas presence, establishing quasi-protectorates, intervening in local conflicts, assisting post-conflict recovery and reconstruction -- the list goes on.
Arriving at a consensus on a coherent strategic view is vitally important for our foreign policy over the long haul. Clear strategy helps us sort out priorities and directions among the cacophony of competing interests I've only begun to identify. By framing our strategic objective as "marginalizing extremists" rather than "defeating terrorism," it is my belief that we can arrive at better answers on how to manage many of the specific issues we will confront in the coming decade. The Bush Administration has begun to adapt its strategic framework, and we should encourage that process.
{cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism}
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