What It Will Take to Win
The movie "United 93" comes at an opportune moment in this fifth year of the war on terrorism. Those who see the movie cannot fail to be deeply moved by the intelligence, initiative, and courage of the ordinary-extraordinary Americans on board. They came face to face with Islamofascism, recognized it for the unalloyed evil it is, and died thwarting its likely mission, to destroy the White House.
Today we are all passengers on a flight into the unknown. We are challenged, as the passengers on Flight 93 were, to respond to an unfamiliar menace. Our fanatical enemies seek to erode our will through the creation of the same indefinite insecurity.
The first requirement is exactly the same as that imposed on the passengers of Flight 93: to know that this is an enemy incapable of compromise. There are some among us, good people as well as political mischief makers, who find it hard to accept this and fret about the Patriot Act and protective measures like random security checks, identification cards, and the like. At the same time, our political leadership has to create a new strategic narrative that does not violate our values but stiffens the sinews. We have seen that when the military performance deviates from our principles, domestic and international criticism undermines our staying power. The enemy knows that we have a low tolerance for high casualty rates. The 1993 U.S. Army Field Manual put it thusly: "The American people expect decisive victory and abhor unnecessary casualties. They prefer quick resolution of conflicts and reserve the right to reconsider their support should any of these conditions not be met."
Well, we certainly got quick results in Afghanistan and Iraq, revealing what could be achieved by relatively small, light forces. It took only three divisions in a three-week blitzkrieg to unravel Saddam Hussein's Army.
Spin. But after the spectacle, the hard slog. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has returned in strength to the rural south as America prepares to hand over responsibility for the area to NATO forces. In Iraq, the administration was slow to see that it would take more forces to support a civil society in a historically fractured land than it took to win the war. Clearly, our capacity to deal with insurgency will have to be improved.
The secretary of defense sensibly proposes an expanding force of elite special operations troops capable of being in continuous operation to combat terrorism outside the battle zone. It is wise to send teams to do operational planning and intelligence gathering overseas. They will prepare for a wide array of overt and clandestine activities, like gathering intelligence on terrorist networks, attacking training camps, targeting terrorist leaders, and partnering with local military forces. Skills in language and knowledge of local cultures are clearly essential, as is the creation of the high-tech tools critical to finding a hidden enemy.
All this is to the good, but we still lack a coherent narrative for countering that of the terrorists. The terrorists understand media. A July 2005 letter to al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, purportedly from Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, declared: "I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media." Zawahiri understood that spin may drive the conflict as often as the battle may dictate the spin.
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