I agree. The article’s premise that winning requires creating a stable, democratic state behind you is false. That is a scheme to keep a peace, not winning the war. Our dilemma is that we are not exhausting our foes capacity for action against us. By trying to prop up a “stable, democratic state” before exhaustion, we give terrorists a sufficient base to continue operations.
Our foes are amorphous and the “countries” we are fighting against are disunited themselves. They choose terrorism as a mode because it requires no united national backing or infrastructure, and because they know they would lose drastically in a conventional forces war. Fighting terrorism is grossly inefficient, so the terrorists’ strategy is to wear us down, destroy civil liberties, and ruin our quality of life in the meanwhile. Only by eliminating civilized values could we become ruthless enough to deal with them (i.e., systematic genocide against Muslims would work, but we would become uncivilized beasts in the process). We lack the political will for that.
Not sure what the solution is, but what we are doing isn’t it.
We agree and all comments have merit. We do not have the political will to defeat terrorism on the battle field. And we don’t have the tools to beat them through infiltration and starvation (cut off resources). We certainly do not have the leadership to get all rational western nations together on a united strategy that would require both approaches. But here is how I believe it could, and someday must, work.
The “battle” will need to be ruthless and acknowledge the fact that there will be a great number of collateral damage casualties of war. (This actually works in favor of the approach to some degree). We need not be afradi to target mosques and whole neighborhoods for fear of killing the innocent. The message needs to be clear: 1) There is no safe place to hide and 2) Any intentionally or accidentally in proximity to even suspected enemies of the USA is in mortal, immediate and iminent danger. The policy MUST be announced and executed in this manner. “US Militay will carry out the mission of exterminating all percieved enemies of the US, so called Muslim Extremists where ever they are. We will not be asking permission or giving warnings. And the most important directives are to kill the bad guys by whatever means determined most efficient on the battle field, wherever that may be, and 2nd, to protect AMERICAN lives.” If this means firebombing a neighborhood because intel has determined that 5 terrorists are there, so be it. They hide in a mosque, create a hole there in the earth. This policy and the execution of it will be ugly and upsetting. Women, children and babies are gonna be killed. But all will soon realize, they don’t want any part of what is bringing the hell to their house. The bad guys will be ostrasized out of fear.
The second part of the strategy is to infiltrate radical groups all over the world. This too would require some sanctioned actions that we would not want to speak of. Covert agents might be required to participate in murderous events to get deep under cover. We don’t want to know about what it will take. This strategy too would cripple the enemy as they would be reluctant to trust any recruit and could turn on their own, making recruitment a bit more challenging.
But alas, we all agree, America doesn’t have the guts to take this approach to win THIS war.