America is not winning its war on terrorism. We are not even discussing it intelligently. An official National Intelligence Estimate confirms that we are creating more jihadist terrorists than we are killing. President Bush is correct that we have disrupted Al Qaeda as an organization, but we have simultaneously enhanced its attraction as a movement. The cancer has metastasized.
The shock of 9/11 and the very real threat from Al Qaeda has led to a distorted debate in the United States about what needs to be done. Democrats are worried about being regarded as soft, and try to out compete Republicans in toughness. What the country really needs to win the current struggle is not hard power or soft power, but a strategy that combines them effectively into smart power. But we are not discussing that.
The Administration has drawn analogies between the war on terrorism and the Cold War. The president is correct that this will be a long struggle. Most outbreaks of transnational terrorism in the past century took a generation to burn out. But another aspect of the analogy has been neglected. We won the Cold War by a smart combination of our hard coercive power and the soft attractive power of our ideas. When the Berlin Wall finally collapsed, it was not destroyed by an artillery barrage, but by hammers and bulldozers wielded by those who had lost faith in communism.
There is very little likelihood that we can ever attract people like Osama bin Laden: we need hard power to deal with such cases. But we cannot win if the number of people the extremists are recruiting is larger than the number we are killing and deterring or convincing to choose moderation over extremism. The Bush administration is beginning to understand this general proposition, but it does not seem to know how to implement such a strategy. To achieve this - to kill our enemies, but also to reduce their numbers through deterrence, suasion and attraction -- we need better strategy.
In the information age, success is not merely the result of whose army wins, but also whose story wins. The current struggle against extremist jihadi terrorism is not a clash of civilizations, but a civil war within Islam. We can not win unless the Muslim mainstream wins. While we need hard power to battle the extremists, we need the soft power of attraction to win the hearts and minds of the majority. Polls throughout the Muslim world show that we are not winning this battle, and that it is our policies not our values that offend. Presidential rhetoric about promoting democracy is less convincing than pictures of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Despite these failures, there has been too little political debate about the squandering of American soft power. Soft power is an analytical term, not a political slogan and perhaps that is why, not surprisingly, it has taken hold in academic analysis, and in other places like Europe, China and India, but not in the American political debate. Especially in the current political climate, it makes a lousy slogan -- post 9/11 emotions left little room for anything described as "soft." We may need soft power as a nation, but it is a difficult political sell for politicians. Bill Clinton captured the new mindset of the American people when he said that the electorate would always choose "strong and wrong" over "timid and right."
As a nation, however, we need Democrats to press hard power issues like the failure of the Administration to implement key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report or the inadequate number of troops in Afghanistan, and we need Republicans to press for a strategy that pays more attention to attracting hearts and minds. For example, many official instruments of soft power - public diplomacy, broadcasting, exchange programs, development assistance, disaster relief, military to military contacts - are scattered around the government and there is no overarching strategy or budget that even tries to integrate them with hard power into an overarching national security strategy. We spend about 500 times more on the military than we do on broadcasting and exchanges, with little discussion of trade-offs. Nor do we have a strategy for how the government should relate to the non-official generators of soft power - everything from Hollywood to Harvard to the Gates Foundation -- that emanate from our civil society.
If Republicans and Democrats continue to ignore soft power and our public discussion is limited to a competition about who can sound tougher, our truncated debate will remain like the sound of one hand clapping. America's current partisan atmosphere has ossified our foreign policy debate. What the nation needs is a discourse that recognizes the importance of both hard and soft power and debates a smart strategy to integrate them.