Outside View: The wrong war again
Last week, Washington roiled in revelations about the war on terror with reports of drone strikes in Pakistan secretly approved by that government; National Security Agency tapping of the German chancellor's and French president's phone calls along with dozens of other heads of state; and what to do once the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force ends with the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Sadly, the contradiction for the Obama administration, as for George W. Bush, is embedded in the misguided phrase "global war on terror." The concept of a "war on terror" isn't only flawed. Worse, it cannot work. Americans have long been subjected to many wars declared against drugs, poverty, crime, illiteracy, racism and, of course, terror. None has worked. The reason is that none of these scourges is a war and treating them as such usually produces solutions directed at symptoms and not correcting actual causes. Terror is a tactic, ploy and tool to achieve larger ends. Lenin understood that. The purpose of terror he asserted was to terrorize. When adversaries don't need nor possess armies, navies and air forces, terror is a highly effective, less costly and more relevant alternative. As the United States learned in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the most powerful military in the world cannot defeat an enemy that owns no army, navy or air force when other instruments required to overcome the fundamental causes that produce insurgencies and terrorism are missing in action. Further, the vocabulary to define properly the "terrorist" adversary along with the associated syntax and grammar to defang this threat is absent. Terms such as Islamic violent extremism or radicalism; jihadism; and other invented phrases confuse not clarify the real issue, which isn't the acts of terror, however dire, but the underlying causes that produce such violence and contribute to the ability of these groups to attract followers. In one sense, creating a conceptual underpinning for waging what has been mistakenly called the war on terror is simple. The issue is recognizing that these acts of violence represent political revolutions albeit ones that incorporate larger religious characteristics and perhaps share more in common with the religious wars of the Middle Ages or the Crusades than 1789, 1848, 1917 and the Cold War but must be dealt with in a broader context.
