The proverbial hammer
Today greeted me with two contradictory headlines. Fareed Zakaria urged a beginning to the end of the war on terror. The Wall Street Journal reports an expansion of U.S. military authority to intervene in Mali and other parts of the Sahel against extremists, using drones and special ops teams, as we do in Yemen and Pakistan.
Fareed does not argue that the threat no longer exists, only that it can be dealt with in the normal legal framework rather than the extraordinary one put in place after 9/11. Nor, I imagine, will the Pentagon ignore completely the non-military aspects of the fight against al Qaeda linked groups in Mali. Our military officers are far too smart, and far too deeply committed to counter-insurgency, to ignore the social, economic and political matrix that is providing safe haven to extremists in northern Mali.
But the fact is that we are still over-emphasizing military responses to terrorism, rather than using preventive and civilian approaches before the emergence of a clear threat. Northern Mali, Tuareg grievances and various extremist groups existed well before this year. Why were we ignoring them when it might have been cheaper and easier to prevent them from emerging in the first place?
We are still playing global whack-a-mole with terrorists rather than developing a strategy that makes them unwelcome in the poverty-stricken, relatively weak and conflict-prone states in which they find safe haven. If we are successful in Mali, they will no doubt find have someplace else. Strengthening the indigenous capacity to resist and repress extremists is much more likely to produce results. It is also likely to be far cheaper. But it requires a more forward-looking, anticipatory and civilian-based strategy.
Instead, we are now deploying an additional Defense Intelligence agents abroad. They will number 1600 in five years time. This makes no sense, unless they will be doing intelligence collection that would be better done by civilians agencies.
If al Qaeda central still exists, someone there is surely calculating today where to move to when Mali gets too hot. Northern Nigeria? Niger? Back to Somalia? There are lots of options. What we need is a comprehensive strategy that enables a preventive approach to strengthening local governance. The military may recognize that as the requirement, but it is not their responsibility to meet it. Our civilians–State Department and USAID as well as Justice and Commerce departments–need the resources and capabilities to undertaken expeditionary activities that today are possible only for the Defense Department.
We are the proverbial hammer that views everything as a nail. Some jobs require a screwdriver.
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“What we need is a comprehensive strategy that enables a preventive approach to strengthening local governance. ”
Nation-building on a continental scale? Good grief, we can’t even handle BiH. Obama has promised it’s time to stop nation-building abroad (he was probably thinking of Karzai when he said it) and start doing some nation-building here at home. There would be no arguing with success, but have we had that much in trying to persuade other countries – or maybe more importantly, other countries’ leaders – to change their preferred ways of doing business? The ways that are obviously working for the leaders, at least.
America’s attempts at saving the world seem to be generally interpreted as part of an over-arching strategy aimed at world dominion. And after the past few years of watching Washington at work, the world doesn’t seem to find this an attractive proposition. I suggest we subcontract the job out to people who are able to accomplish worthwhile goals without arousing international ire – the Scandinavians, say, or the Canadians.
The Scandinavians may not be interested, unfortunately – they publish a lot of detective/crime stories describing just how horrible life actually is behind the pleasant facade, clearly in an effort to persuade the rest of the world that they should not be made to govern it. Can you believe there was actually even a Danish tv show that devoted an entire series to solving a single murder? (As compared to the wholesale slaughter they’re still arguing over in the Balkans. For instance.) I think I will learn Danish.