Our overly militarized response to Al Qaeda’s attacks, the global war on terror, could be more sensibly recast as a global counterinsurgency campaign. Insurgency is an attempt to overthrow a government or change its policies through the illegal use of force; Al Qaeda’s stated objective—to expel the West from the Islamic world and re-establish the Caliphate—can be usefully conceived of as a global insurgency. It would then take a global counterinsurgency campaign to confront this challenge. Counterinsurgency—a coordinated use of all elements of national power to defeat an insurgency is a slow and difficult process, often requiring years, but it can succeed when well resourced and executed.
[…]Defeating an insurgency requires winning the support of the population away from the insurgents, and unlikely as it seems, the “hierarchy of needs” propounded decades ago by humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow is never more applicable than in a combat zone. After obtaining basic security, people want to live and work under the rule of law, with a chance for economic progress.
[…]Important as governance and economic development are, the single most pressing need is the ability to fight more effectively in the global war of ideas. During the Cold War, which was primarily an economic fight, secondarily a military one, and only third an ideological struggle, the U.S. Information Agency still did yeoman’s work publicizing the objectives of American policy and pointing out the contradictions inherent in the Soviet Union’s. From 1953 through 1999, USIA did everything from promote jazz and American libraries abroad to broadcast the Voice of America and Radio Martí. But with incredible shortsightedness, the government allowed USIA to become a victim of its own success. As a cost-saving measure in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, it was disbanded, and many of its most strategic functions were shifted to the State Department.
That shift encapsulated two critical errors. The already underfunded State Department was in no position to devote money to the information fight, and the department’s culture of reporting on foreign countries’ policies is in direct opposition to the very idea of public diplomacy, which focuses on changing, rather than merely talking about, the actions of foreign governments. As a result of these misguided organizational decisions, American efforts to fight the global war of ideas are badly coordinated and often contradictory. […] On a broader scale, there has been no attempt to capitalize on the still-potent attractiveness of American culture and freedom through expanded exchange programs for artists, authors, and academics, as occurred during the Cold War. The United States must rebuild its ability to project its image abroad, and it can start by relaunching USIA.
[…]The struggle against radical Islamists is not primarily a military fight. The Department of Defense will continue to have a critical role to play, but we cannot kill or capture our way out of this problem. Victory in this long struggle requires changes in the governments and educational systems of dozens of countries around the globe. This is the task of a new generation of information warriors, development experts, and diplomats; it is every bit as important as the fight being waged by our men and women in uniform, but nowhere near as well recognized or funded.
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Winter2009)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Foreign Policy, Military | War | Peace
