American Strategy in the New Arab World
Print
Email
With daily reports of protests and violence from the Arab Spring uprisings—combined with the death of America’s main target in the War on Terror—the question facing U.S. strategists and policymakers is both simple and complex: what do we do now?
To be sure, America has a strong hand to play in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing. But there is limited time to capitalize on the dividends we stand to gain from playing our cards right.
In order to win, it’s critical that State, DoD, and the CIA quickly leverage new opportunities and the many different levers of power to combat radical terrorism in the brave new Arab world. Here are four areas worth exploring:
1. Direct Outreach & Aid
Direct outreach, through foreign investments, humanitarian aid, and developmental assistance has always played an important role in U.S. foreign policy, and should now include a very powerful message: namely, that already-politically-weakened terror organizations like al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood have outlived their welcome and are no longer needed for defending the people of the Arab Spring nations against their now-deposed tyrants.
Bin Laden’s death—coupled with the decreased political relevance plaguing al Qaeda in recent years—could be used alongside U.S. assistance to at-risk nations to send the message that terrorist organizations are fickle liabilities for societies and people groups committed to progress and reform.
2. Information Campaign
The U.S. should use the information we have uncovered about bin Laden’s duplicitous lifestyle in an information campaign against the at-risk people targeted by al Qaeda recruiters. By coupling bin Laden’s words about ruthless anti-Western Islamic piety with images of his avid porn habit and images of his very modern—dare we even say, Western?—accommodations and technologies, the United States can begin slowly eroding the corrupt lies used to recruit youth and other vulnerable people on the fringes of society to the al Qaeda cause.
While this type of campaign won’t deter those al Qaeda fanatics who are hell-bent on avenging bin Laden’s death, it could prove effective in stemming the message of al Qaeda recruiters aimed at youth and others potentially left out of the benefits of the Arab Spring. The contrast of bin Laden’s words—used to convince young people to kill themselves and others—juxtaposed against the visible images of their revered leader’s true lifestyle and practices would at the very least provide a strong counter argument to the lies that al Qaeda peddles to vulnerable people.
3. Surveillance Techniques
Lawmakers and others should assess what the success in killing bin Laden tells us about needs and necessities within our own policy community. The recent renewal of the U.S. PATRIOT Act by the President and Congress should be the first thing we question in light of bin Laden’s death. While the PATRIOT Act was originally presented as a way for us to track down and target the operations of terrorist operatives domestically, many have also touted its ability for giving the Intelligence Community greater “eyes and ears” into the workings of terror organizations generally.
Yet, bringing down the most-wanted man in the world was not something that required domestic wiretaps, sneak-and-peak searches, or other privacy-infringing domestic operations. Instead, it was a classic foreign operation which used a combination of high-tech geo-spatial reconnaissance, unmanned drones, foreign wiretapping, and classic spy craft to determine and confirm bin Laden’s hideout.
Though I haven’t seen the specifics of the operation which got bin Laden, I’m fairly certain that accessing my bank accounts and library loan records—which the PATRIOT Act allows—didn’t give us a greater ability to put a bullet in bin Laden’s ten ring. Policymakers and others need to clearly reevaluate—in light of what worked against bin Laden—the proper legal tools needed for modern intelligence operations and many of the outmoded tools contained within the PATRIOT ACT.
4. Defense Spending
Similarly, American policymakers should—in this season of belt tightening and talks of across-the-board sacrifices to budgets—really re-examine the wisdom in proposing defense budget cuts. Even as Secretary Gates and the President have proposed slashing the Pentagon budget—and have been joined by a whole chorus of others who want more reductions than even they are asking for—it’s important for everyone to look at the big picture.
Even though bin Laden’s death is a blip in the overall horizon of international terrorism, it is a turning point that we can use in our broader counterterrorism efforts. Rather than talking about cuts to the Defense budget—and as some fear, the Intelligence Community—policymakers can’t simply hand out high fives here and call it a day. Doing so would repeat the same mistakes made immediately following the Cold War, when we slashed the Intelligence Community’s budget and vastly reduced our human intelligence assets (which in turn created some of the intelligence failures witnessed on 9/11).
Instead, they need to ensure the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense are supplied with the funding, resources, and technologies necessary to effectively and meaningfully exploit the information reaped from bin Laden’s compound and to really begin waging a full-on counterterrorism campaign.
As we digest the intelligence gained from bin Laden’s compound, we’ll likely have more targets of opportunity to target, kill, or capture. In this kind of strategic environment, we need to closely examine any calls for budget cuts and ensure that they do not degrade our ability to target terrorists and counter the WMD threats we still face. It’s true that “history favors the bold.” For American policymakers, boldness may require maintaining seemingly-bloated defense and intelligence budgets in times of economic difficulty, if doing so means capitalizing on this moment that we have to go on a full-scale counterterrorism offensive.
* * *
Of course, all of this marks a complicated series of “next steps” in America’s strategy for dealing with—and eventually defeating—terrorism. Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist organizations may have lost an icon in their fight, but they have yet to lose their means and mechanisms for carrying out attacks against us.
The recent spate of terror warnings, discovered plots and expanding searches provide a sobering reminder that the death of Osama bin Laden marks the end of one chapter in America’s ongoing struggle against global terrorism, but certainly not the end.
The final chapter in our war against al Qaeda won’t be determined by this win, but rather by what moves we make next.
Photo Illustration courtesy of Kudzu1 and The Egyptian Liberal
