Who’s Winning the War on Terrorism?
Declining to say whether the U.S. and its partners are winning the war on terror, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Saturday for more focus on combating poverty and other underlying causes of extremism.
“I think we are still early in this contest,” Gates said in a question-and-answer session with attendees of a conference on Asian security, an annual gathering that took on an unusual dimension with the participation of a senior Chinese general who offered a pointed defense of his country’s military buildup…
A member of the audience later asked Gates whether he thought the United States is winning the terror war.
He cited areas of progress, including the elimination in late 2001 of Afghanistan as a haven for al-Qaida. But he also said the Islamic extremists have managed since then to expand their recruiting grounds.
He explained: “One of the disturbing things about many of the terrorists that have been caught is that these are not ignorant, poor people. These are educated people, often from professional families. So dealing with poverty and those issues is not going to eliminate the problem, but it certainly can reduce the pool of people prepared to give their lives for this cause.”
That is most certainly true. Many terrorists are not poor and uneducated at all. On the other hand, as I understand it, most of the footsoldiers are. Some might criticize Gates, but I think that he approached this issue honestly, reasonably and intellligently: the war on terrorism is a long war, it is also a war with multiple faces. The ‘war’ will not end in, say, 2010. It will go on for decades. It is a battle of ideologies, those battles are seldom fought in a couple of years.
Sec Def Gates is head and shoulders above his predecessor, because he is willing to lay it on the line, and gives thoughtful analyses, not snappy comebacks. In doing so, he shows a modicum of respect for his audience, which after years of Rumsfeld’s arrogance, we should all appreciate.
The WOT is not something that can be won per se, but something that the next several generations will have to endure. We can only hope to disrupt their plans while not sustaining critical damage to our military might. But to do so requires a flexible force that can strike in different arenas, and respond in many different ways.
Their resources are much more limited than ours, yet they have definitely given us a run for our money. Cunning and ingenuity, not conventional force are the best weapons we posess. We also are learning to give a little to get a little and use local resentment of al queda’s heavy-handed tactics against them. But that requires that we not use heavy-handed tactics ourselves, because that is what has put us in the predicament we’re currently in in Iraq.
We’re spending on the order of 10-100 THOUSAND times more to fight this war than the opposition.
Is that sustainable?
Andy
You’re talking about a different war. In Iraq we’re not fighting terrorism, we’re providing them with recruiting and training opportunities.
Right now the fight against terrorism is not proactive but reactive and Gates accidentally let the truth slip out.
Wrong the war on terror is very proactive.
The only place we SEE the war being fought is in IRAQ.
Therefore the war is lost.
Wrong.
However you antiwar chaps will believe what you want to believe so don’t let me stand in the way of your delusions.
True: the war on terrorism has many sides to it. Some of it as proactive, some of it is reactive. In general, I do believe that the West is doign a poor job propaganda-wise as I wrote yesterday. We should be fighting this war on all levels, and we should take the initiative completley.