In a recent column David Ignatius argues that the war on terror is good for – causing more terrorism. Basing himself on a book “Leaderless Jihad” by Mark Sageman, a former CIA agent with experience fighting terror, he writes in “the Fading Jihadists:”
The heart of Sageman’s message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat — and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain’s Web site puts it, the United States is facing “a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists” spawned by al-Qaeda.The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists. The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a “clash of civilizations.”
It’s the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman’s account, it’s a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls “terrorist wannabes.” Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.
In other words, bringing the fight to Al Qaeda has successfully routed two generations of enemies. So given that the fights were successful in the past, we should learn that we will be successful in the future, if we would only stop fighting the terrorists.
As nonsensical as this sounds, as you can surmise from the first paragraph quoted above, that this is to be one of the themes of the Democratic nominee starting this summer: our fight against terror is only causing more terror, so we have to stop fighting.
Bret Stephens isn’t buying though. He writes in An Inordinate Fear of Terrorism?
That caveat, however, turns out to be broad enough to drive a truck bomb through. Mr. Sageman believes the third generation of jihadis only came into existence with the near-destruction of the first two, achieved by force of arms in Afghanistan and maintained by the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops in the country. He insists that the war in Afghanistan did not have a galvanizing effect on the third generation, and that the sanctuaries that still remain to Osama bin Laden in the Pakistan hinterland don’t provide a particularly useful base for global jihad.Really? Even before the U.S. toppled the Taliban, Yusuf Qaradawi, the most influential cleric in the Sunni world, took to the airwaves to insist that “Islamic law says that if a Muslim country is attacked, the other Muslim countries must help it, with their souls and their money, until it is liberated.” As for the Pakistani sanctuaries, a National Intelligence Estimate from last summer noted that al Qaeda had “regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas, operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.” Those capabilities are now making themselves felt through suicide terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
No doubt the invasion of Iraq did spur a younger generation of jihadis to new fits of apoplexy, particularly in Europe. Yet when Mohammed Bouyeri murdered Theo Van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, he was reacting to Mr. Van Gogh’s film “Submission,” which uncharitably depicts the treatment of women in Islam. Similarly, when mobs burned down the Danish embassy in Beirut, the “rage” turned on a dozen or so offending cartoons. The threshold for jihadist violence, it turns out, falls below whatever levels are set by current U.S. foreign policy to include what used to be known as free speech.
More importantly Stephens writes:
…if recent experience in Iraq demonstrates anything, it’s that nothing is likelier to deter future terrorists than the defeat of existing ones. In letters captured by U.S. forces in Iraq late last year, al Qaeda “sheikhs” lament how the flow of foreign suicide bombers has dried up as the likelihood dims that their “martyrdom” will result in anyone’s death other than their own. There is, said one of these sheikhs about his dwindling minions, “panic, fear and an unwillingness to fight” ever since U.S. and Iraqi troops went on the offensive.
In other words fighting terror successfully means that you have to fight to win. Remarkable, who’d have thought such a thing?
Ignatius is showing a bit of pattern here. Back in December he championed the most recent U.S. NIE about Iran. Wolf Howling explained everything that was wrong with the NIE. However, Ignatius nearly broke his arm patting himself on the back for championing the new way of thinking about Iran in “the Myth of the Mad Mullahs.”
The secret intelligence that produced this reversal came from multiple channels — human sources as well as intercepted communications — that arrived in June and July. At that time, a quite different draft of the Iran NIE was nearly finished. But the “volume and character” of the new information was so striking, says a senior official, that “we decided we’ve got to go back.” It was this combination of data from different sources that gave the analysts “high confidence” the covert weapons program had been stopped in 2003. This led them to reject an alternative scenario (one of six) pitched by a “red team” of counterintelligence specialists that the new information was a deliberate Iranian deception.A senior official describes the summer’s windfall as “a variety of reporting that unlocked stuff we had, which we didn’t understand fully before.” That earlier information included technical drawings from an Iranian laptop computer purloined in 2004 that showed Iranian scientists had been designing an efficient nuclear bomb that could be delivered by a missile. Though some U.S. analysts had doubted the validity of the laptop evidence, they now believe it was part of the covert “weaponization” program that was shelved in the fall of 2003.
The most important finding of the NIE isn’t the details about the scope of nuclear research; there remains some disagreement about that. Rather, it’s the insight into the greatest mystery of all about the Islamic republic, which is the degree of rationality and predictability of its decisions.
Ignatius was strangely silent a few weeks ago when the Director of Central Intelligence, Mike McConnell rejected some of the findings of the NIE.
Put these two episodes together and it appears that Ignatius is taking the approach if you ignore Islamo-fascism it will go away. Unfortunately, the truth is closer to: if you ignore it, you will go away.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
