The BBC reported last week that fundamentalist Islamist factions have occupied six military bases in Mogadishu vacated by Ethiopian peace keepers and seem poised to claim the Somali government. http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
What do we gain by spending trillions to occupy, pacify and remake Iraq or Afghanistan when the radical religious fundamentalist can simply set up shop in another country, or better yet, use the democratic processes we work so hard to build to legally assume power through political means? What is our wider strategic vision for containing the spread of radical religious extremism? What tools are available and how should they be employed? Follow me and help flesh out a better policy for tomorrow....
It bears keeping in mind when discussing our wider strategic goals in the declared "war on terror" that, regardless of how we choose to define the war and regardless of which countries WE designate as "central fronts," the enemy we face is amorphous, knows no borders and cannot be contained within a given geography. Unless we better understand the nature of our enemy, clarify our wider strategic goals and develop a more meaningful strategy for success, our foreign policy will continue to flounder and may likely devolve into a wack-a-mole strategy, requiring us to deploy troops to one hotspot after another as we chase radical religious extremists around the globe with untold costs in treasure and lives.
It seems like a million years ago. I was a 22 year old interpreter on a counter intelligence team sent to Mogadishu, Somalia for the U.S. Army. The year was 1987. Alliances in the horn of Africa had been dominated by the U.S. policy of containment, with Russia having a foothold in Somalia and the U.S. in Ethiopia, only to have each of those Countries essentially switch alliances only a few years before I set foot there.
The Country was an interesting mix of new and old. There were modern buildings and restaurants occupied by European and African entrepreneurs. Cars and trucks shared the road with goats and cows. There were no traffic signals. Motorists honked their horns during the day in a kind of morse code to indicate intent and warn pedestrians. At night, as if observing some unwritten noise ordinance, they did not use horns, but chose to drive with their lights off...flashing them as they approached intersections and creating a very unsettling strobe effect, illuminating dark figures in freeze framed progression as they ran for their lives across the street.
Monuments to the proletariat were erected in Mogadishu's town square and were reflected on the official money, remnants of the soviet influence. Bushmen were filtering into the towns and cities and their makeshift grass huts could be seen built against the stucco walls of many buildings throughout Mogadishu. The competing ideologies of the soviet union and the united states were, by and large, lost on these people. They simply did not have the cultural or political history necessary to provide context to those ideas or to "buy in" to one ideology over another.
Somalia was full of bright shiny faces. I was struck by their general good nature. Slightly built. Elegant. Charming. Without exception, those I met were gracious and humble. Most were Muslim, but there were also many Christians. Despite my protestations, most thought I was Russian. I somehow befriended two boys about 10-12 years old who always managed to show up just about everywhere I went and who, inexplicably, directed me away from unscrupulous vendors in the market and other dangers that I, as a foreigner, might not appreciate....(like the time I went golfing at the International Golf and Tennis Club and they went ahead of me with machetes to find my ball and kill black mamba snakes hiding in the 10 inch brown grass of the "fairway." After two holes I stopped, worried about their safety.)
Prior to my Somalia adventure, I was a student of terrorist networks and counter terrorism tactics. I analyzed histories and governments of the Middle East for my military intelligence unit. I was detached to translate documents captured by the Israelis during their 1982 incursion into Lebanon. From those documents we identified major and minor "terrorist" organizations, their members, their rhetoric and their tactics, from hijacking to letter bombs. At that time, religion played only a minor part in what we in the west called "terrorism."
The major motivator at the time was not religion, but the plight of the Palestinians, which were perceived almost universally throughout the Arab/Muslim world as victims, routed from their homes and caged in camps with few rights or freedoms by an increasingly hostile zionist movement with strong U.S. support. Say what you will about the history of Palestine and how it unfolded, but this perception among Arabs and Muslims was (and is) widespread, infecting friend and foe alike, both on the street and at the highest levels of government. This sentiment continues to underpin the rhetoric and propaganda of terrorists like Bin Laden and most radical Islamist philosophies.
In the 1980s, the "Palestinian Problem" lacked sufficient political traction to command international action and religious elements began to supplant political alliances as standard bearers for the Palestinians and, increasingly, for Muslims in general against what was being perceived and feared as the incoming tide of Western imperialism. Wrapped in the cloak of "God" these groups promised decisive action in defense of their cultures and religion, increasingly framing issues in terms of religion rather than politics.
The United States, still focused on the U.S.S.R. as the greatest threat to its security and dominance, played on those latent religious sentiments at the time, inciting and encouraging religious holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was there that we first helped religious extremists develop their recruiting propaganda, building the case for righteous "jihad," arming and training them to "repel the invaders" from what we happily acknowledged as "Muslim land." In retrospect, it's obvious we were playing with fire.
The rationale used to incite and prosecute jihad against the Soviets has now been turned against U.S. Now it is WE who are perceived to be defiling Muslim ground. Prior to and since 9/11, one of Bin Laden's biggest propaganda points was the threat of Western cultural, economic and military imperialism. The presence of western oil companies and military forces in Saudi Arabia, the holiest of Muslim holy lands, embodied this threat and its "affront to Islam." The fact that we've maintained a military presence in Kuwait since liberating that Country, have occupied and are exploiting the fields in Iraq and have threatened action against Iran only plays into these fears. The perception that the U.S. is interested only in acquiring these oil rich areas has grown as our interests have become more entrenched and our cultures more entwined. This perceived affront is compounded in the mind of the religious fanatic by every transgression and mistake we make....whether it be the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, our tacit complicity in Israeli policy, Abu-Ghraib, civilian deaths, no bid contracts, long term oil contracts, etc., etc., etc.
Radical religious extremism is an idea...not a country...not a government and not an army that can be defeated in a decisive battle. It exists only through a collective perception of victimization and the promise and hope that some champion can deliver those victims. If you bludgeon it in one place, it will likely pop up in another. Indeed, bludgeoning it here and there may actually cause it to spread faster and pop up in places previously considered "safe." Instead of devolving into wack-a-mole foreign policy, where our Army is dispatched to one extremist hotspot after another, it makes more sense to inject some reality and clarity into the nature of our enemy and our wider strategic goals for dealing with this TYPE of threat, rather than focusing exclusively on individuals perpetrating crimes in the name of this movement and quashing them in one particular locale or another.
Afghanistan is simply one place where radical religious extremists gained a foothold, consolidated their power and actually formed a government. But Afghanistan was never the center of radical religious ideology and is not, by any stretch, the only place where that meme has gained strength and power. Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia and Egypt, to name a few, all have strong, influential radical religious movements, sharing the same basic motivating characteristics and beliefs albeit differing in specific detail among the groups.
It should not be lost on us that today, seven years after 9/11 and our declaration of war against "terror" that there are actually more radical religious hotspots, many of which will likely assume the mantle of "official government" as illustrated by recent developments in Somalia and, even more worrisome, Pakistan. Can it be that our policies are backfiring? In my estimation, the clear answer is "yes." Considering what happened in Somalia last week, it is clear that the new governnment will most likely be what we in the west would consider an anti-western radical religious government.....which brings me to the strategy portion of this diary and the question of how we should, as a matter of policy, deal with anti-western religious governments, whether democratically elected or not.
First, I would submit that we should not overreact to governments that we consider to be dominated by religious fanatics. In my experience, over time, those governments weaken under their own weight because nobody likes oppressive religion. Our experience with Iran is instructive.
Prior to invading Iraq, the religious regime in Iran was at its weakest and true grass roots and student reform movements were underway, threatening to marginalize the influence of the Mullahs. Had that movement progressed, Iran might have naturally evolved into a less hostile and more openly democratic state. Our invasion of Iraq and our decision to lump Iran into an "axis of evil" at that moment in time, weakened those reform movements and actually strengthened the religious fanatics, who had claimed all along that the U.S. was only interested in an oil grab. The reactionary motivator of "fear" pushed that country to the right....just like our country moved to the right out of fear post 9-11.
Invading Iraq under false pretenses and simultaneously setting the stage for action against Iran were acts that played into the rhetoric of the Islamic religious right.
The same lessons can be seen in Afghanistan. Prior to our arrival the religious fanatics were firmly in power. But as with most governments dominated by religious zealots, what had begun as a movement to deliver Afghanis from poverty and corrupt western influences, had devolved into a totalitarian society where religion was interpreted and imposed by force....brutal force. By the time we took action, Afghanistan was ripe for democratic reform and had we simply stayed on that mission, instead of getting sidetracked in Iraq, we might well have had that Country much further on its way to stable democratic independence by now and kept religious fundamentalism on the run.
Bush's decision to invade Iraq, when viewed in the context of middle eastern history and terrorism, will ultimately be viewed as one of the biggest strategic and tactical blunders of our time, not only because it mired us in an unnecessary and costly war at an inopportune time, but because it played directly into the hands of the religious fanatics worldwide, causing those movements to gain strength and power when their defeat was within our grasp. Simultaneously, the threat of religious extremism, itself, was lost in a more amorphous notion of "terror" as the target of our efforts.
But even in Iraq, as our enemies descended on our exposed Army and virtually incited a civil war, the true nature of the religious fanatic backfired, again. Beheadings in the name of Jihad? Suicide bombing for God? Again, their own tactics were backfiring and creating the conditions for their own defeat.
With religious factions regaining traction in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Sudan and Somalia, we need a different strategy for coping with and ultimately taming religious fanaticism particularly where political group lawfully gain power running on that platform.
In my estimation, we would be better off recognizing and working with such governments, keeping them close and challenging them to live up to their promises. As they inevitably struggle, as all dogmatic intolerant philosophies do, we should be encouraging peaceable transformation and the evolution of their governing philosophy.
One of the key points of our democracy building exercises that has been sorely lacking to date, is a principled discussion of the importance of separation of church and state in any functioning democracy. Bushco was uniquely unqualified to teach this lesson and we are all the worse for it. Only when government is free from religion, but protective of individual rights to explore and worship, can democracy truly function. As we revisit our broader strategic and tactical goals in the war on terror, engaging in this discussion may prove to be the most productive starting point.