The war on terror: mission ambiguous

The Los Angeles Times

The war on terror: mission ambiguous

By Olivier Roy

Olivier Roy is the author, most recently, of "Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah."

THE U.S.-LED WAR on terror was supposed to be a global answer to a global threat. In its four years of operation since the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it has had three strategic goals.

Its first and paramount goal is to destroy Al Qaeda and prevent the terrorist network from rebuilding a territorial sanctuary anywhere in the world — hence, the necessity to occupy territory and to establish friendly, democratic and stable regimes able to control their countries.
This goal has yet to be achieved.

The current governments in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot survive without direct American military support, stretching U.S. forces thin. Domestic and regional constraints and political turmoil handicap both regimes. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda "de-territorialized," the contemporary form of guerrilla warfare: It is never where one expects it to be, and it doesn't offer targets for military strikes. More than that, movable terrorist sanctuaries are being built in Pakistan and even in Iraq.

U.S. military operations have yet to fully destroy territorial sanctuaries in Pakistan, nor have they led to the arrests or killings of the most-wanted terrorist leaders. U.S. military forces have killed only one major Al Qaeda leader. Traditional police and intelligence work is responsible for the bulk of the arrests of the terrorist network figures so far.

There are now two different wars: the one against Al Qaeda and the one in Iraq. The link between them is increasingly shaky.

The first rationale for invading Iraq after 9/11 vanished quickly after no weapons of mass destruction were found and Saddam Hussein's reputed operational ties to Al Qaeda proved to be unfounded.

The second reason for attacking Iraq — bringing democracy to the Middle East is the best way to destroy the roots of terrorism — became a strategic goal based on a wrong premise, that the roots of global terrorism are in the Middle East.

Al Qaeda militants operating in the West are westernized Muslims. For instance, the alleged terrorists who carried out the London bombings converted to radical Islam while living in Britain. Whatever political changes come to the Middle East will not extinguish the reasons why they and other westernized Muslims embrace jihad. In any case, the prospects for democratization are double-edged: Success seems remote or, if achieved quickly, will give religious forces political power.

One should not equate Islamist political movements with terrorism. In Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, mainstream Islamist movements are slowly accepting democracy and some form of secularization. Shiites in Iraq also exemplify this pattern.

But we are far from achieving the strategic goal of establishing friendly, democratic and stable regimes in the Middle East.

Even if a relatively stable government emerges in Baghdad, its positive effect on neighboring governments looks moot. The current political turmoil in Iraq is undermining democratization in Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. In all these countries, radical elements, rather than moderate democrats, are on the ascendant. Worse, any removal of U.S. troops from Iraq would enhance Al Qaeda's prestige, reinforce Iran's regional role and call into question the U.S. commitment to reshape the Middle East politically.

The war on terror's third strategic goal is to rid the world of rogue states that support terrorism and seek to build nuclear weapons. The overthrow of Hussein's Baathist regime eliminated one rogue state, and the Bush administration has turned its attention to Iran. But the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have reduced the probability that Washington will militarily move against it.

The U.S. military presence in Iraq is not a threat to Tehran. Quite the contrary. It is insurance against a U.S. strike. Although U.S. military action cannot be entirely ruled out, the stalemate in Iraq has given Iran sanctuary or, in the least, bought it time.

Meanwhile, Iran has benefited, without firing a single shot, from the defeat of Hussein and the Taliban, its two main regional enemies. And the emerging Shiite-dominated regime in Iraq is the best possible outcome for it. Tehran also believes that it can survive economic sanctions, which, if imposed, could boost oil prices higher.

Foreign policy experts in Europe and the Middle East see a fourth strategic goal of the U.S. war on terror — controlling oil production. But Washington is doing nothing to command the oil- producing areas in Iraq, largely because it is the markets, not who controls the oil fields, that decide prices today.

In fact, the oil factor has been a neutral in the strategic equation of the war on terror. Such a hostile regime as Iran might be a more reliable oil provider than "friendly" ones because it desperately needs petrodollars and cannot afford to halt production. Most oil- producing countries make little use of oil as a political lever, while consuming countries can't push economic sanctions against rogue states too far.

Energy markets tend to operate independently of military events in the Persian Gulf, which means that they can live with political instability and that there is no military solution to an energy crisis.

Yet the belief that the real objective of U.S. intervention is to take oil-producing areas away from Sunni Arabs and hand them over to Arab Shiites, in cooperation with Iran, is deeply entrenched in Arab public opinion. This perception is shaping an alliance between secular Arab nationalists and Sunni fundamentalists, which is at work in Fallouja and on the rise in Syria and Saudi Arabia.

The only real strategic achievement of the U.S. war on terror might be one Washington never intended: reshaping the Middle East along ethnic and sectarian lines instead of bringing democracy to it.