Know Your Enemy: How to Defeat Al-Qaeda

“Know your Enemy as You Know Yourself and You Can Fight A Thousand Battles Without Disaster.” – Sun Tzu 

   To understand how to defeat Al-Qaeda, we must see our enemy as more than just some Arab fanatics, but grasp its ideology, its methodology, its grand strategy and its tactics.   It is clear that Al-Qaeda’s end game is an Islamic Caliphate uniting the entire Islamic world under strict Sharia law and traditional Muslim codes.  Its methodology is to sow chaos across the middle east, prompting ethnic conflicts and civil wars that weaken regional regimes and at times, use America and its vast military capabilities to take down mutual foes with the intent to take power as American resolve weakens.   It seems our enemies grand strategy is to terrify the populace and drain the resources of Western Civilization into collapse.  The sad reality is that with all of our military successes, with all of our progress in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and everywhere, they still have fight left in them while divisive election year politics, rampant conspiracy theories and economic woes have severely weakened domestic support for our fight against Al-Qaeda.   So as Al-Qaeda slithers through North Africa and adopts “low-cost bleeding” strategies, America will need to be more effective at isolating Al-Qaeda from the frustrated Muslim youths that field potential recruits while finding cost neutral means of carrying out its fight and raising the standard of living in the Middle East.   To defeat Al-Qaeda in the long-term, America is going to have to actively engage itself in the development of Middle Eastern micro-economies while investing heavily in the education and training of tomorrow’s youths, while aggressively responding to attacks and combating efforts in part by bolstering regional security forces, but often by making use of our own.   

       The domestic populace has learned to tune out the bombings and stylized propaganda, as an increasingly fiscally conservative peace movement within the Republican Party threatens the budgets necessary to effectively combat Al-Qaeda.  This means that like Al-Qaeda, America is going to have to learn to fight Al-Qaeda on a budget.   We are going to have to do more with less and push the young democratic regimes across North Africa and the Middle East to take these issues seriously and stand independently while increasing coordination with Russia, China, India and other traditional competitors.  With both history and long-term strategic interests in jeopardy, America must use combating Al-Qaeda as an opportunity to repair and strengthen security ties with these strategic partners that have been damaged by Libya and Syria.  Nato verse the world will not be sustainable in the future as an awakened and rising co-op of BRIC economies, Arab and Islamic states along with Venezuela have sought to form a counter-balance to America and the West.  The commitment and trust among these groups, however is unclear, and by bold leadership and genuine diplomacy a bandwagon effect behind America can win out.

         In today’s culture, we love the excitement of explosions and bombs.   We love the challenge of military conflict and with so much money flooding into military technologies and weaponry it is easy to sell complex communications and defense systems to a public that demands a response and legitimately needs to feel secure.   The problem is that the more bombs we drop, the more bullets we fire, the stronger our enemy becomes in the hearts and minds of the Middle East populace.  We have to be conservative in our usage of force, appearing to exhaust diplomatic options while decisively and at times unilaterally using force to combat terrorism.

         We cannot halt all of our operations, but we have to be more stealth in our utilization of force.  The CIA is going to have to have an increased role, running spy rings, penetrating the inner circles of Al-Qaeda cells and covertly coordinating with Seal Teams, Marines and regional forces to viciously enact justice when Al-Qaeda affiliation is clear.   America needs to monitor the WMD and nuclear arsenals of the Middle East closely, with carefully planned operations to extract caches when the time comes that action is necessary.    The reality is that America cannot afford a full-scale invasion of Iran right now and if it can be avoided with Iran halting uranium enrichment while complying with UN regulations than we should consider it a needed victory without a fight.    

         Sadly, Al-Qaeda across the Middle East and the Taliban in south east Afghanistan have shown increasingly rapid evolutions in tactics compared to US troops which are beginning to give them an advantage.  COIN has shown itself to be a tremendous asset in fighting insurgencies but we need to allow a means for it to adapt quicker based on the events on the ground within the theater of war.   We need to allow the troops on the ground wider tactical experimentation and a means of sharing the results and examining the results in a quantifiable way that can verify increased effectiveness.  We need to fight fire with fire and as Al-Qaeda learns from the backlashes of gross civilian casualties in Iraq it has adapted to wage psychological attacks such as the lighting of fires in Russian forests while increasing its humanitarian outreach in vulnerable locations such as Somalia.  We need to deny Al-Qaeda the legitimacy it desires, finding regional alternatives to provide the stability, rule of law and humanitarian relief Al-Qaeda (and Hamas in Gaza) provides for neglected and vulnerable populaces trapped in the destitution of what they perceive as neo-colonial wars.

      America deserves credit for taking chances in Egypt and Libya, to allow for democracy at the risk of increased instability within which Al-Qaeda has traditionally benefited.  America cannot neglect these young republics, even as security and public support is minimal.  There is too much to gain by action, and too much to lose by inaction.   The politically motivated criticisms in the management of these situations lose sight of the real issues we face.   The people showed their power, they stood up to autocratic military rule and demanded a voice in their futures.  The Muslim Brotherhood, with its checkered history and role in extremist ideology well known, must be isolated from that of Al-Qaeda, as must the Taliban in Afghanistan while America and the west must simultaneously hedge against the potential for attacks on Israel.  This involves better management of the propaganda matrix of those nations and aggressive efforts to show that democracy and economic liberalism are better choices than Islamic extremism or Communism with the continued fostering of strong diplomatic relations with the new leaders of these nations.  America needs to align its realities with its ideals and have the patience to help these young democracies develop democratic institutions as opposed to heralding strongmen for the exigent of security.  Ultimately, however, “Debates about democracy, military rule are for us.  For the elite.  All most people down there care about is their daily rice, while they take refuge in the saints.   If the military keeps the port running, keeps the buses and factories running, they are content.  The real struggle is not who rules, but to make people care about who rules (“Monsoon” by Kaplan, p.150).” We need to stabilize the nations of the Middle East, while showing the capacity for peaceful transitions of power so that that private and public capital is comfortable investing in real economic development. 

    While it is likely that America will have occasional military actions in the Middle East and across the greater Islamic world, its primary mission over the next ten years will be one of education and economic development.  While the probabilities of US action in Syria and Iran remain high, and the risk of a greater Muslim response resulting, avoiding full-scale war in favor of increased investment in economic development and education will do more to stop the spread of Al-Qaeda.   Simple programs like guns for livestock and farming equipment, peasant micro-finance, irrigation and infrastructure projects, along with better education and schooling in basic rudimentary trade fields such as construction and blacksmithing will do wonders to improve both quality of life and security.  Send in the technocrats and economists to help develop the rural marketplaces with sustainable traditional economies and future recruits will drop the fight for work.  America has educated thousands of Middle Easterners, its time to develop more aggressive coordinated programs with regional governments to send them to their home nations and develop economic and political activities.  Let outside finance and management build jobs for the local populace, but lets not forget the need for developing the internal capacity of vulnerable nations to do construction and infrastructure projects.  As Robert Kaplan notes, “Realpolitik with a conscience is what India, and the West, too, require, for in the broader competition with China, the power with the most benign and cosmopolitan vision will ultimately have the upper hand. (Kaplan)“ If we work with the population’s natural leaders to set achievable and realistic economic standards from the national, provincial to village level the situation on the ground will change momentously for the better. 

   The recent gains of Al-Qaeda in Mali and amongst the chaos of Syria and the Arab spring should be kept in perspective treated as rule of law issues that the young democracies of north Africa can rise to address with minimal outside help.   Mali needs outside intervention, Syria will need outside stabilizing forces when Assad’s regime finally collapses.  The west cannot run in the face of electoral politics and economic struggles from their responsibilities to defend the democratic aspirations of these capable societies freed from the oppression of long-lasting dictatorships.   Islam is as equally compatible with democracy as evangelical Christianity.  500 million Muslims live in the democracies of south East Asia, and there is no reason that the majority of Muslims in the Arab world and North Africa cannot embrace democracy.   While western civilizations need to wrestle with the balance of their ideals and interests, the Islamic and Western worlds alike needs to define their struggle less as a clash of civilizations and more as a battle within humanity; a struggle between beliefs structures that are relics of ancient times, and the realities of modernity and ways of the future.  Indonesia poses the model for the future of Islam majority nations where “although 85% of the country is Muslim, 85 percent of Indonesians reject the notion that the state should be formally based on Islam, preferring instead the puralist- and democracy-affirming principles of Pancasila, the moderate nationalist ideology enshrined in the 1945 constitution, with its five principles of belief in God, nationalism, humanism, democracy and social justice (Kaplan, p. 256).”  In the end, the labels and ideologies used to divide humanity will cease to be strong enough to oppress our shared humanity.  When America considers that  “Al-Qaeda’s strategic sin was arrogance; the jihadist group had the power to tear society apart but was not strong enough to pull it back together again in its own image,” America needs to be weary not to allow partisan politics to do the same to our nation.