Terrorism

When 9-11 happened, my first question was, "who did this?" My second question was, "what are their terms?" I was in the streets of DC that morning, having had a job interview canceled on me, watching the F-16s scramble overhead while people poured out of office buildings.

It may seem odd, but that morning I had lots of time to think. Maybe it was anarchists. They're always so angry about trade agreements. The World Trade Center makes sense. I bet they want an end of corporate hegemony. Maybe it was radical vegetarians, like in 12 Monkeys. Any minute they'll come on TV demanding the freedom of all animals from their cages and feedlots. I was wrong, of course. But then again, my thinking wasn't all that different from the experts that sent us to Iraq.

And that wasn't the only day a terrorist act has occurred. Many came before 9-11, and many since. With that, and every other attack, there are a few common points. Someone's claimed responsibility, and someone's made demands. The problem is that it's always someone different, asking for slightly different things. In almost 10 years since 9-11, I've never heard a satisfactory answer to either of those questions for any of the dastardly deeds committed across the globe, yet somehow we're embroiled in at least two wars.

It comes down to this. You can't go to Terrorist Headquarters and ask them what they want. In this context, the nearest analog to an "evil empire" is found in a bunch of caves in Central Asia. For all the World War II metaphors, Neville Chamberlain wouldn't know who to appease, and Winston Churchill wouldn't know who to fight. This is new territory. This is the decentralized, atomized and anonymized 21st century.

How do you fight a war when who you're fighting, and what they want is unclear, and when who they are changes all the time? Take the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. Here's a guy who tells the court that terrorism won't stop until the US leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, stops flying drones over Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, ends its monitoring of certain Muslim-Americans, and who knows what else.

Whether you agree with his position or not (I don't), who is he to name the terms of a cease-fire? Who does Mr. Shahzad speak for? Can I threaten thousands of lives, get arrested, and speak for all Americans? Everyone who's right-handed? If I did, should anyone take me seriously? But if you say you speak for Muslims, there's an audience of suckers who always do.

Guys like Daniel Pipes keep viewing the problem of Islamic terrorism as if there were a specific country, army, or group of people to invade, conquer and maybe assimilate. For the hawks, bombing Iran, rounding up all Palestinians, and maintaining permanent garrisons across half the world is the only response. Not knowing who they're fighting, they pick everyone. They propose the most disproportionate of responses to a relatively small threat.

And it is a small threat. The worse-case scenario for a terrorist attack is something like a small nuclear device going off in a city. That would be terrible, but this is nothing in comparison to all-out conventional warfare that nations regularly engage in, or the specter of Mutually Assured Destruction that loomed over us all during the Cold War. We shouldn't allow any terrorist act to happen on ours or our allies' shores. But we can't pretend that this is war in any real sense, with any serious historical comparison to the bloodshed of the past.

Some people on the left think that terrorism will stop if the West embraced a certain set of conditions. All of this would stop if the Palestinians got a fair shake. Leave Iraq and Afghanistan alone, and they'll leave us alone. But whose conditions are they? Who can guarantee that all elements of Islamic society will be satisfied once we cross everything off some list? There is a subset of individuals who are genuinely interested in taking over the West in the name of Islam. Are they the leaders of a particular country? Do they have a real army? No, but they exist, and they should be dealt with.

Terrorism is a tactic. It's not a people or an ideology. It's used by different people with different ideologies. There is no Al Qaeda Mission Statement, no bylaws, no dues structure. Most people are neither paranoid and belligerent nor are they naive and foolhardy. Knowing what we don't know, most people might agree that you can't defeat terrorism in a traditional war, nor can we negotiate a cease-fire with someone who isn't there.

To me, all this lends itself to a mixed approach. Neither nuke nor negotiate. It also represents an opening to define the terms of this battle, instead of being led by them.

Clearly the world would be better off if the West worked towards resolution of some of the major geopolitical issues relevant to the Muslim world, like Israel/Palestine, oil dependence, economic and political development, and a hodgepodge of others. But we can't expect that changing the context alone will lead to an end of terrorist aggression.

Clearly we can't let a gaggle of bearded illiterate cave-dwellers threaten our cities and towns. But they will cease to dominate the discourse of the Middle East when people there have something better to do, like going to school and working. In the meantime, as we do what we can to improve the context that feeds this abhorrent thinking, intelligence and special ops cleans up the crazies. But invading a country and killing thousands of civilians is no way to create good will.

This isn't a simple "us versus them" scenario. They never are. In many ways, soft and hard power work against one another. Too much diplomacy and good cheer allows cynical, genuinely evil people to take advantage of us. Warfare makes people mad, generating an endless supply of suckers for the cynical and evil among them, making diplomacy all the more difficult.

A fractious enemy requires a fractious approach. Anyone who proposes a simple solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism is either crazy or selling you something.

Those who forcibly argue for simple solutions to today's geopolitical dilemmas are either: 1. psychotic, 2. a human rights lawyer, or 3. a defense contractor. Each are part of a solution, but think that they're the whole thing. For them, there is wisdom in knowing the limitations of your own powers of persuasion. This goes doubly for the 1's. This goes triply for Daniel Pipes.

For our leaders, there is wisdom in identifying, isolating and ignoring the 1s, while using the 2's and 3's in a mix of varied tactics to achieve a strategy leading to an end of terrorism, peace and prosperity. Having clear objectives and listening to the right advice is what being in charge is about.

Interests that employ terrorist tactics don't have anyone in charge. They don't have rational, obtainable objectives. There is no negotiation with that, but like our own hawks, not knowing exactly who the enemy is, or what their objectives are, leads to endless, all-out, incoherent war to the death. We must think bigger than they do.

It's time to re-imagine an end to this mess, present a vision of that image, and make it happen. That's leadership.