Kudos to University of Michigan's Juan Cole for hitting the nail on the head. Invoking Martin Luther King's "need for the method of non-violence in international relations," that war can never be a "positive good" or a "negative good" (that is, is war preferable to surrender to a totalitarian regime?), he called upon the United States to recognize its own limits of military superiority. War and interventionism inevitably lead to unintended consequences and blowback, which explains why the U.S.-backed mujahadeen ousted the Communists from power in Afghanistan and why former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega is now president of Nicaragua.
Indeed, the post-9/11 nature of war, for better or for worse, is changing. Gone (mostly) are the days of conventional wars fought between two opposing armies. "Today, the possibility of conventional interstate war is lower than at any time in five hundred years," wrote Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations in his recent book, War Made New. Yet nor are counterinsurgencies in the mold of Iraq or Afghanistan the new norm.
No, the wars of the future will be fought increasingly between states and non-state actors (i.e. terrorist organizations). Like Turkey's conflict with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) or Israel's recent skirmish with Hezbollah, war will be primarily fought in the unruly frontiers of countries and entail cross-border incursions by Special Forces or surgical air strikes. While these wars may be more limited in scope, they will be more frequent and the circumstances under which they will be fought will be murkier, the casus belli less clear. There will be no victory parades after the cessation of hostilities because it will be difficult to determine the victor (After all, who won last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah?).
And here's a stubborn truth that foreign policymakers must grapple with: The deck is stacked in favor of the non-state actor, not the state. That is because future wars will not be waged over territory or ideology or religion; they will be fought over hearts and minds--a public relations battle that cannot be measured in body counts. As the underdog, the non-state actor only has to stand up to Goliath, as it were, and its victory in the mind of the public is virtually sealed. "How war is perceived has as much importance as how it actually is fought," historian Daniel Pipes noted in the New York Sun after the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in 2006. "The Clausewitzian center of gravity has moved from the battlefield to the opeds and talking heads."
Indeed, Hezbollah is arguably stronger and more popular among average Lebanese today than it was prior to its summer 2006 skirmish with Israel. Though Kurds are not particularly fond of the PKK, which has waged a violent decades-long campaign for greater Kurdish rights, Ankara's heavy-handed response to the PKK's hit-and-run attacks--repeated air strikes and "hot pursuit" commando raids against rebel strongholds in northern Iraq--has only endeared the PKK to Iraqi Kurds. They are now seen as freedom fighters, not terrorists. The PKK has lost more lives than its Turkish adversary. But they have won the battle for hearts and minds.
So then how does the United States pursue non-state actors like al-Qaeda while simultaneously win over local Muslims? If the deck is stacked against the state and military victory can never be secured on the battlefield, what hope is there we can win the war on terror? It has become almost a cliché in foreign policy circles to say there are no military solutions to the counterterrorism campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, only political solutions. But if that is so, then why do states (United States, Israel, et al) engage in so many un-winnable wars with non-state actors?
Take the example of Turkey. The current strategy in vogue in Ankara is to pursue a policy of "hot pursuit." "I believe operations will continue on this scale--pin-point operations, hot-pursuit raids and carefully controlled air strikes," retired Turkish Brigadier General Haldun Solmazturk recently told the BBC, in reference to air strikes against PKK targets in Iraqi Kurdistan. "This approach has to be maintained to have an impact." The United States employs a similar strategy in its hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border. As then-Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute told a Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2007, U.S. forces do not need the approval of the Pakistani government "to pursue, either with fires or on the ground, across the border." Even surveillance reports of insurgents setting up rockets and pointing them toward Afghanistan are enough to trigger a U.S. military response, he added.
Indeed, the steady erosion of sovereign borders and growing threat of non-state actors like al-Qaeda suggest that these kinds of cross-border incursions will grow ever more frequent. Moreover, because states fear tipping local sympathies toward the side of the non-state actor--and losing the public relations battle, as it were--these kinds of "hot pursuit" missions will not be sustained, heavy-handed attacks with massive casualties but rather short in-and-out raids or air strikes. The targets will not be large population centers but terrorist camps or weapons caches, mostly found along borders. But the question is: Can this kind of war strategy work? That is, does a policy of "hot pursuit" limit war to the extent that states can accomplish their military objectives without sacrificing their public relations aims?
History, unfortunately, shows it does not. The trouble, to borrow the (admittedly hackneyed) Goldilocks analogy, is that "hot pursuit" raids are not heavy-handed enough to dislodge the threat but just heavy-handed enough to turn local sympathies against the state. The outcome is a worst-of-both-worlds scenario: A prolonged conflict with public opinion decidedly against the state.
So then what's the solution? To win this kind of war, a more patient approach is required. The best option is to rob terrorists of their local base of support by vastly improving conditions--social, economic, and political--on the ground, something states should be doing anyway. Non-state actors' main lifeline is local support, without which they cannot establish sanctuaries, recruit locals to their cause, and launch cross-border attacks. PKK support in southeastern Turkey waned only after socioeconomic conditions improved for local Kurds, not as a result of Turkish bombing of PKK targets. If anything, the latter only exacerbated the situation and turned locals against Ankara, needlessly prolonging the decades-old conflict.
Local sympathy for the Taliban along the Afghan-Pakistani border is driven as much by a lack of jobs as it is by religious or security concerns. The better off the locals, the less attractive the Taliban become because the opportunity costs of siding with them--or any non-state actor for that matter--become that much greater. Hezbollah is attractive to marginalized Lebanese not only because it delivers services and provides security but because the opportunity cost of siding with them against the state is not especially high.
Another important factor to remember: It's often said that the state is at a disadvantage because its political leadership must respond to its people, who want to see immediate military progress. Hence, there is an urgency to nation's war aims. Not so with non-state actors, which can drag out their campaign of terror over years, if not decades. But I would flip this statement on its head: The longer the conflict, the greater the likelihood that non-state actor will overreach and needlessly target civilians, which will turn away public opinion against it. In southeastern Turkey the bulk of the PKK-orchestrated attacks in recent years have targeted ethnic Kurds, not Turks. In Anbar Province, those most affected by al-Qaeda-orchestrated suicide bombs are local Sunnis, not Coalition forces. Small wonder then that in late 2006 local tribal elders turned against their Sunni brethren and sided with the Americans. Pardon the cliché, but if states give non-state actors enough rope, they will hang themselves. Time, in this regard, is actually on the side of the state.
Thus, the best strategy for the state is not to retaliate with military force--whether limited surgical strikes or a full-blown invasion of ground and air forces. A heavy-handed military response is just what the non-state actor is hoping for, as it keeps their cause in the spotlight and turns locals against the state. "The PKK's main goal is to internationalize this issue," Yilmaz Akinci, economy adviser to the Diyarbakir Industrialists and Businessman Association, told me on my recent trip to southeastern Turkey. "Their biggest fear is becoming irrelevant." Military raids, even targeted strikes against terrorist camps, only serve to shift public opinion over to the side of the underdog non-state actor. Inevitably there are civilian casualties. Terrorists are taken hostage and reports of mistreatment leak to the press, however true or untrue, which only strengthens grassroots support for the non-state actor. Nor, however, is what some, including Harvard University's Joseph Nye, call "soft power" the preferable solution. Public diplomacy efforts have an abysmal track record in the Muslim world. If locals are not fond of American foreign policy, no amount of cultural exchanges is going to sway them. Rather the best policy is one of restraint that seeks to win over locals by integrating them into the fabric of the state socioeconomically, culturally, and politically.
Of course, hawkish military types might think: Geez, if there is no threat of retaliation, because of the inevitable PR backlash, what's to stop terrorists from just stepping up their attacks against civilians? Are states forever consigned to sit on their hands in the face of threats posed by non-state actors from neighboring states? Don't we have a right to self-defense under international law?
Yes, we do. But if war were presented before the people honestly, a military spokesman would have to say: "We can militarily intervene but, barring a scorched-earth tactic ala the 1982 Hama massacre against Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, we are guaranteed to fail--that is, to eliminate the threat posed by the non-state actor--and lots of innocent lives will be lost and in the process we will turn local public opinion against us and only legitimize the terrorists."
If the war on terror were presented like this, I think the case could be made that a policy of restraint--especially seeing how time is in fact on our side, not theirs--is preferable to war. Non-violence is what Martin Luther King would have wanted.