Last week, in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton held out an olive branch to Taliban militants willing to lay down their arms. In March in an interview with The New York Times, President Barack Obama suggested Washington might be willing to talk with some Taliban militants. This is a remarkable departure from the Bush-era, highlighting a new strategy in the fight against terrorism.
When Obama took office, the expression "war on terror" disappeared from the vocabulary of senior administration officials. A few weeks into the new administration, an email to senior Pentagon staff members highlighted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror.'" The shift is not only a matter of semantics. It is a strategic one.
George W. Bush first used the phrase "war on terror" a few days after the 9/11 attacks. Before Congress he defined it as a civilization's fight. It emphasized the gravity of the threats and called for solidarity amongst the civilized against the barbarians. The president's "us" against "them" rhetoric reflected the belief that terrorism is not just an immoral tactic, but also an immoral condition, and as such that it must be eradicated. The correct response to terrorism according to this approach was thus primarily military.
But the "war on terror" phrase ill-defined the phenomenon, and eventually proved counterproductive. It conveyed the idea of a unified and transnational enemy, but the variety of types of terrorist organizations is great. Al Qaeda is not Hamas. Unifying them into a single movement, andoverstating their threat, encouraged disparate groups to unite and turned criminals into holy warriors.
Under the leadership of Robert Gates the Pentagon has for some time now been at work planning a new approach. The 2008 National Defense Strategy allocated equal importance to mastering irregular warfare as conventional combat. "We cannot capture and kill our way to victory," explained Gates. General David Petraeus, the mastermind of the new counterinsurgency strategy, reinforced this idea when he affirmed that "the more force you use, the less effective it is." These comments highlight a major strategic shift.
Today the formula is more brain and less brute force. Military operations are subordinated to "soft power" initiatives. In fact, the National Defense Strategy asserts that "beyond security, essential ingredients of long-term success include economic development, institution building, and the rule of law, as well as promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people..." In other words, rather then through military victory alone, success is consolidated by the resolution and the transformation of the conflict.
A report released in 2008 by the RAND Corporation underlines the new thinking in security. The study observed that the most common way terrorist groups end--43 percent--was via a transition to the political process. The second most common way -- 40 percent -- was through police and intelligence services either apprehending or killing the key leaders of these groups. Military force was effective in only 7 percent of the more then 600 cases examined.
Obama's new approach suggests an interesting link between security and peace. Terrorism is often an extension and radicalization of internal, national conflicts. The root causes of a conflict such as lack of political opportunities, economic inequality or social instability as result of modernization, are the root causes of terrorism as well. David Kilcullen, a key adviser to General Petraeus, in a recent meeting in Washington told me "we believed that peace is a product of security, while today we are learning that security is a product of peace." This opens the way for rigorous and fresh thinking about the relationship between counterterrorism, conflict resolution and peacebuilding--where the primary focus is the well-being of the population and not the elimination of the enemy.
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