The paradox of the War on Terror and Bin Laden's death:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In the War on Terror the USA has chosen to wage war against a variety of Middle Eastern non-state organizations. During the previous Administration we did this to prop up such noble champions of freedom, liberty, and justice for all like Hosni Mubarak. the problem is that the USA wages war with conventional armies, the tools of states and governments, against movements that lack states or means of conventional warfare and in fact are agents of asymmetric warfare, not the other kind. The USA as noted has done this to prop up the various dictatorships that finally toppled when their own repression overextended itself.

There are two fundamental paradoxes of this. Nonstate organizations aren't conventional armies. There are no generals, no possibilities of surrender. It's part war, part occupation to fight them. The type of war needed to fight these organizations is the kind that US Armies as a rule have been rather bad at. The USA is good within limits with fighting conventional wars, provided it gets two years to get ready and then a year to fix all the defects in its military structure from fighting a previous generation of warfare. Yet here the USA has a major issue the death of Bin Laden illustrates.

The conventional army can be brought to surrender by defeat on the battlefield, but the asymmetric force is a rather different reality. Bin Laden has been killed, so this is a sign that one man is dead. Thing is he wasn't General Bin Laden, just one of many chieftains of a movement operating in hydra-cells. We've killed Bin Laden, and so he cannot orchestrate more 9/11s. The ultimate problem is what do we do now? If killing these people is what it takes to win victories in the War on Terror, where do we stop? It is logistically prohibitive to organize hits on every single terrorist leader at present, and we lack any means with regular armies to defeat these movements with the means of regular armies. So if killing an Osama Bin Laden is how we define victory, why are we using soldiers to do what spies would do better? If killing Osama Bin Laden will not bring victory, then it is indeed a good thing this individual man is dead, but what ultimate point beyond the death of those who live by the gun barrel did it serve? Anything at all? 

So long as the USA tries to wage this War on Terrorism to support Arab world dictatorships, it cannot win that situation because all the overwhelming force possible cannot give a dictatorship the legitimacy it does not have on its own. But so long as victory is the death of every successive Al-Qaeda Number 2 and now the death of Number 1 we cannot win this either as every previous Al-Qaeda Number 2 was replaced by the previous Number 3. I am quite satisfied that Bin Laden is dead. I, however, seem to miss how this does anything in a serious, straightforward sense other than killing him, and this is so regardless of which Administration would finally have done it.

Comments

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

Dare I say that the singular thing most likely to prevent future terrorist attacks on the U.S. et al is an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan?

I can't definitively assert that, but I have to wonder if it is true.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

You can't avert them by simply withdrawing from Afghanistan so long as the USA's attitude to societies there is to prop up dictators for our convenience. *There's* how we actually "win" the War on Terror, but that's indirect and lacks the Michael Bay way of war that people attribute with victory so we'd never stop to consider it.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

The paradox of the War on Terror

You could have stopped there.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This is just one example that illustrates the paradox. Comparisons to Yamamoto miss that 1) he was an Admiral in a regular military and 2) Japan kept fighting for two more years afterward.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Wars against ideologies are like fighting air, except that anyone witnessing a man slugging away at the breeze would call the men in white coats instead of cheering him on.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yet you end up wondering why people keep trying to repeat what doesn't work. >.<

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Because to do otherwise would require a change of thinking and apparently that is outside the comfort zone of our leaders and the people who vote for them.

I'm fascinated that captured plans from OBL's lair included attacks on trains in the U.S. during the 9/11 anniversary. Trains? Did they also discover a dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Very sadly this does seem to be the case. I mean the whole principle of killing leaders only works if you're dealing with something that *can* be weakened by cutting off the head. These movements don't work like this and the fundamental grievances they channel aren't changed by killing one of them.

As far as the attacks on trains, I think it was probably too much Batman Begins m'self. ;P

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I don't wonder. We're human. Our basest instincts tend to override the gift of reason when we let our guard down.

The same goes for wars against things and concepts (drugs and poverty).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Point.

[whoasksfinds.livejournal.com]

war against ideologies are fought with alternative ideologies. sometimes those ideologies meet on a battlefield.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that this particular ideology's fighters know damn well they'd lose a conventional engagement so they don't fight that way.

[whoasksfinds.livejournal.com]

they certainly went to iraq.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

War is for militaries. We have perfectly good words to describe contests of a variety of other natures.

And frankly, we've diluted the word enough. It has become a poor catch-all for politicians determined to act serious about problems of all kinds, heedless of whether or not an actual war is what is best for handling the problem.

Hammers are good for pounding nails. If the problem is disarming explosives, then I want to use something of a more... delicate nature to deal with it.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

You're forgetting that terrorists are conspiracy theorists, so it doesn't matter what we do, they'll just come up with something else. America had troops in Saudi Arabia, legally, under agreement, as a result of Gulf War I, and bin Laden decided he didn't like that so he was going to kill hundreds of Muslims and Africans. But yes, I'm sure if we didn't have troops in Saudi Arabia, he would've integrated into mainstream politics.

Your logic is surprisingly neoconservative. As long as there are dictatorships, they will be involved in world affairs and we will deal with them. The other options? Deal with nobody or invade everybody and install "peace-loving democracies". This very line of thinking is the root cause of paleo and/or neo-conservative foreign policy.

The point is, we won't be taking action according to the sensibilities of the self-radicalized. The movement leaders in extremists groups are wealthy, political and educated. They do not subsist on injustice. They, like every other leader, subsist on vanity, power and envy. They are vain men who want power and crave the power of being a movement leader. How and where we conduct our foreign policy is incidental to this.

Terrorist movements are fringe movements generally discredited in the eyes of the Muslim world. Making them happy means bupkis when dealing with the Muslim world.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Just to be clear, radicalized terrorist movements do not represent the Muslim world, nor do they have any finger on the pulse of the Muslim world.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's why I said Arab world dictatorships, as the Arab world is not part of the broader Muslim world. These people would exist regardless, but we aren't really waging war against them so much as to prop up the dictators of the region, which is where the problem is.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

My logic is not that we shouldn't deal with them, but that we shouldn't wage wars to prop them up and call it bringing democracy. *That's* Neo-conservative logic. My preference is for a democratic Middle East, no matter how unpleasant that's going to be in the short term. The dictators there create a witch's brew the longer they last and can turn to the USA to prop them up against their own people.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Sure, that's great, but having democracies won't help. You really want to piss some people off? Emulate the Western agents and install a Westernized democracy. Democracies don't inherently fix things.

[whoasksfinds.livejournal.com]

bin ladens do not grow on trees. al qaeda in iraq was largely defeated by killing their leadership, and marginalizing their ideology. the same thing will, and is happening with the broader al qaeda movement. the conventional military is just one of the weapons of war.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, AQII was defeated by bribing them to go along with what we wanted them to do. Petraeus understood counterinsurgency more than most US generals.

[whoasksfinds.livejournal.com]

we also killed lots of them, and the iraqi people grew very tired of their extremism. if it was simply a function of money, AQI would have returned when the american money dried up. that just hasn't happened.

[whoasksfinds.livejournal.com]

and for the record. the last administration was calling for political change in egypt long before the revolution. and the obama administration didn't exactly come to washington calling for mubarak to step down, they simply reacted to the circumstances.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

While quietly arming Mubarak with all our weapons of war knowing neither he nor any likely democratic movements in Egypt were fond of Israel, and simultaneously arming Israel also. Never stopping to ponder if our M-1s might mean the next round would be one Egypt would actually *win*.

[whoasksfinds.livejournal.com]

the US has been arming mubarak since jimmy carter and the camp david accords. that didn't change when obama came to washington.