A Few Points On The Long War
Support for the Long War requires support for a war of “no exits and no deadlines,” as Prof. Bacevich has described it. Support for a specific military mission in Afghanistan does not necessarily require one to endorse the concept of the Long War or the fundamentally flawed strategy behind it. The debate has been framed in such a way that most people seem to assume that endorsing the concept and strategy of the Long War is an essential part of what it means to support U.S. national security interests and even our current war effort in Afghanistan, which is just about as misguided as it gets.
One can, of course, support the campaign against Al Qaeda without the dangerous and unsustainable Long War framework, but it might require rethinking how to wage that campaign. As Bacevich said in his review of Accidental Guerrilla:
If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda’s game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?
When it comes to dealing with Islamism, containment rather than transformation should provide the cornerstone of U.S. (and Western) strategy. Ours is the far stronger hand. The jihadist project is entirely negative. Apart from offering an outlet for anger and resentment, Osama bin Laden and others of his ilk have nothing on offer. Time is our ally. With time, our adversary will wither and die—unless through our own folly we choose to destroy ourselves first.
There is a split in the country that is very much like the difference between supporters of rollback and containment during the Cold War, but unlike in the Cold War the advocates of containment seem to be a small minority. Even though containment was the wiser, superior policy during the Cold War, it has somehow lost its appeal. During the first two decades of the Cold War advocates of rollback considered it insufficiently “robust” (to use a word that ideological fantasists like to throw around a lot) and not nearly aggressive enough, and current partisans of the Long War concept seem intent on not making the “mistake” of opting for containment, which is to say that they are intent on embarking on fool’s errands.
The Long War is, as Bacevich says in The Limits of Power, “both self-defeating and irrational.” If we wish to secure our country and to get our economic and fiscal houses in order, one thing we have to do is start by scrapping the Long War concept and focusing on national security strategy that has limited, achievable objectives.
6 Responses to “A Few Points On The Long War”
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Containment is clearly preferable to the Quixotic mission of bringing New England Town Hall government to all of Araby. My question is how do you contain a tendency within a faith that our dominant cultural elite refuses to consider “The Other.” The very suggestion of curtailing immigration from the Umma would be a dead letter upon utterance.
Are we the West? If so, how do we define this and how do we incorporated this into policy that will be enforced by a multi-culturalist elite?
As to the Long War, I’ve always thought that one of the legion of errors committed by the Bush Administration was to fail to explain our aims in terms that our enemy and those around them could understand. Muslims understand the concept of balance and retribution. Had we made our intentions clear from the beginning, that we intend to find and punish the perpetrators of 9/11 and come home, we could have saved ourselves a lot of grief. Bush decided instead to fulfill the conspiracy fantasies of every ignorant Muslim in the world with invasions and endless gibberish about Democracy and transformation.
Ron Paul is shown as prophet again. He voted to go after Osama. Osama is still around, and unless we want to turn nuclear Pakistan into a failed state it will be hard to go after him. Letters of Marque and Reprisal are still available…
Containment “somehow lost it’s appeal” because the containee can no longer throw a bunch of missiles at us. I dislike schoolyard psychobabble, but the advocates of “force first” show all the telltale signs of the schoolyard bully — no, not the bully but the subservient weakling who gets his vicarious kicks by cheering the bully on.
There, I’ve vented. Thanks for the space.
Clearly, you mistake containment for a purely passive and reactive stance. This is not what I’m talkng about. Counter-terrorist containment would involve disrupting enemy cells via intelligence-gathering, coordination with other states, covert operations and *very occasionally* military force when absolutely necessary; it would not be a case of waiting for an attack and then launching a response. No doubt some genius will dub this approach as treating terrorism as a “law enforcement” matter, which would be laughable if the subject weren’t so serious.
If you dislike using schoolyard language to describe matters of national security, stop doing it.
Names escape me with time but I seem to remember the British enlisting the help of the former head of Eoika (sp?) re dealing with terrorists. His advice – If you have a rat problem you need to get a cat not a machinegun. Al Queda is best dealt with in the shadows with sharp knives and no press releases.
BTW, Roger Scruton has a very fine article on this matter over on City Journal. The long war begins at home.
Dear Daniel,
I’ve written an article on precisely this question, advocating a containment strategy against a self-defeating enemy in the Long War.
Its in the latest International Affairs, and may interest you:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122232444/abstract
love the blog, btw. come and visit us over at Kings of War!
Patrick