U.S. winning battles against terror; may be losing the war

Strobel and Landay are two of the best journalists in the U.S. ---BBB

Sep. 03, 2006
U.S. winning battles against terror, but may be losing the war
By Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers (formerly Knight-Ridder)
KABUL, Afghanistan

Five years ago, the United States fired its first shots in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror here in Afghanistan, evicting al-Qaida and toppling the Taliban regime that hosted Osama bin Laden's network.

Today, the United States and its allies are struggling to halt advances by a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in large swaths of this still desperately poor and unstable country.

"Things are going very badly," admitted an official with the allied military forces, who asked not to be identified because the issue is so sensitive. "We've arrived at a situation where things are significantly worse than we anticipated."

The trends in Afghanistan appear to mirror the global war on terror a half-decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Bush administration and allied governments have won battle after battle, but appear to be in danger of losing the war.

Indeed, a growing number of analysts, many of them former top government counterterrorism officials, argue that the very notion of a "war" on terrorism is the wrong strategy.

In relying overwhelmingly on bombs and bullets, they say, the United States has alienated much of the Muslim world, driving away even moderates who might be open to Western ideas. The West has largely failed to offer a positive vision or deal with the root causes of Islamic extremism.

The "tactical firefighting" of disrupting terrorist cells and stopping attacks "works pretty well," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defence College. "But it's not resolving the strategic problem. The ranks keep on coming."

The "war" on terrorism "is something that has outlived its usefulness as a concept," said Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman.

A global counterinsurgency strategy would put "more emphasis on political reform, economic development, information operations, and less emphasis on the kinetics - the killing and capturing," Hoffman said. "I'm not saying we shouldn't be killing and capturing terrorists. But ... we've had a disproportionate emphasis on that as a solution."

On the ground, the good news is that bin Laden's al-Qaida network, which executed the Sept. 11 attacks, has been badly damaged, perhaps even crippled, by a multi-pronged international assault by soldiers, spies, policemen and bankers, according to senior U.S. officials and private analysts.

But the threat from anti-Western Islamic extremists has rebounded, mutated and grown.

Bin Laden's warped message of violent jihad has spread, with help from the Internet, like a contagious virus. The ranks of potential terrorist recruits - while still representing a small, embittered minority of the Muslim world - appear to be swelling.

To them, round-the-clock TV images of the war in Iraq and the U.S.-backed Israeli bombardment of Lebanon are proof of bin Laden's contention that the West is waging war on Islam.

With the United States bogged down in Iraq, some specialists say they worry that America's enemies feel emboldened. Some of the early gains after Sept. 11 - when al-Qaida was ousted from Afghanistan and countries from Iran to Libya avoided confrontation with Washington - may be dissipating.

A new report by the respected British research group Chatham House concludes: "There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East."

In Lebanon, Iranian proxy Hezbollah is resurgent after Israeli bombs failed to dislodge it. Hezbollah has outpaced the Lebanese government in rebuilding villages, and its teams bring along TV cameras to record the effort for its propaganda value.

Islamists control ever-larger swaths of lawless Somalia, while in nuclear-armed Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf walks a tight-rope between counter-terror cooperation with the West and appeasing his own Islamists.

In Afghanistan, which has been viewed as one of the enduring successes against terrorism, the Taliban appear stronger than at any time since Sept. 11.

Despite successions of offensives and airstrikes more intense than those in Iraq, the Taliban and their sympathizers now operate freely in six southeastern provinces and control pockets of them, said officials from the U.S. and Afghan governments and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

As the strife deepens, President Hamid Karzai's government and its foreign backers are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the country's citizens.

Despite billions of dollars in foreign-financed reconstruction, growing numbers of Afghans - including members of the Parliament - are furiously questioning the inability of history's most powerful armies to halt the violence and curb the growing civilian toll.

Many Afghans - now with access to internationally funded free media - cite the war in Iraq and U.S. support for Israel in Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories when they accuse President Bush of waging war on Islam in the guise of fighting terrorism.

That perception has brought new motivation and recruits to the Taliban.

Western and Afghan officials insist that it's not too late to stem the crisis if the United States and its allies devote more reconstruction resources, time and troops.

"We've had a lot of success, but we have not won, and we need a major push for several years that is linked to development and security," said Ronald E. Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Outside the Middle East, and often under the radar, U.S. interagency teams have helped local governments develop successful counterinsurgency strategies in places as far-flung as Colombia and North Africa.

Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines are working more closely together and have shrunk the terrain in Southeast Asia where al-Qaida affiliates can operate. Two groups, Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah, are "in the hurt locker," the senior official said. Jemaah Islamiyah was responsible for the October 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, that killed more than 200 tourists.

Yet a growing number of specialists - and some U.S. political leaders - say a fundamental overhaul of the West's counterterrorism strategy is needed.

They advocate a defter approach, one that focuses less on bombs and bullets, and more on winning hearts and minds, efforts to end regional conflicts that spark resentment, development aid and trade.

"Our success in the kinetic realm (of military operations) is certainly not matched in the `soft power' realm," said James Forest, director of terrorism studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Increasingly, the face of terrorism is no longer that of bin Laden, who's believed to be hiding in some Afghan cave or Pakistani city, but of self-generated "pop-up" cells of disaffected young men living on the margins of society in Western Europe. The attacks they plan, such as the July 2005 bombings of London's transportation system, which killed 56 and injured more than 700, may bear only passing signs of al-Qaida's guiding hand.

While terrorist recruitment numbers are impossible to come by, poll after poll shows deep anger at the West, and analysts say a small fraction of the embittered will turn to violence.

Few countries have thought-through strategies to counter such radicalization, said Swedish expert Ranstorp.

"I don't see a lot of headway on this issue" in Europe, he said. "And that's a great failure."

The senior U.S. official said progress is being made on counterinsurgency strategies. But he acknowledged the challenge of developing flexible approaches to deal with insurgents in vastly different countries - or sometimes different valleys within the same country.

"That defies, really, the way we are organized to wage war," he said.

Henry Crumpton, the CIA operative who designed the campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and who is now the State Department's counterterrorism chief, recalled a meeting he had before Sept. 11 with the legendary Afghan resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud.

Massoud, who was assassinated by al-Qaida agents on Sept. 9, 2001, asked him whether the U.S. government was more interested in defeating al-Qaida or helping the Afghan people, he said. Crumpton reluctantly replied that it was the former.

"That still resonates with me," Crumpton recalled. "You can't do one without the other. You can't defeat a terrorist enemy without denying a safe haven to the enemy and without replacing that safe haven" with something better. "It's a lesson for us all. You've got to do both."
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Strobel reported from Washington, Landay from Kabul. McClatchy correspondent Greg Gordon contributed to this report.