How Do We Defeat Al Qaeda’s Brand?

By Chad Pillai.

It has been 13 years since Al-Qaeda attacked the United States. Since that awful day, we have been engaged in our nation’s longest war attempting to defeat and dismantle Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Our Nation went to war in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein and created a rallying cry for die-hard Jihadist to go to Mesopotamia and fight the Americans. Our focus on Iraq left a void in our efforts in Afghanistan which allowed the Taliban to reconstitute their insurgency. Elsewhere in the world, Al Qaeda metastasized like a cancer in Yemen and Africa. Our strategy and efforts to defeat Al Qaeda globally have primarily been kinetic (overt conventional operations, covert drone attacks, and clandestine operations), and despite this, Al Qaeda’s brand remains as dangerous as ever, evident by France’s operations in Mali to defeat Al Qaeda elements. Recently, several former US officials are admitting that our kinetic drone program maybe creating more terrorists than it is deterring. Is it time to reassess our strategy towards Al Qaeda? Do we need to defeat the group or should we focus on defeating the ideology that Al Qaeda stands for?

Analyzing the history of the Cold War serves as a good starting point for this discussion. To a casual observer, the Cold War may appear to be as a solely as a conflict between the West and the Communist nations that faced off for 50 plus years with large military conventional and nuclear forces. Military historians and strategists will focus on the various strategic and operational doctrines employed by both camps, defense budgetary expansions, and the various proxy wars, where both sides were either indirectly or directly engaged in. However, to help explain the eventual outcome of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the truth is far more complicated that go beyond military strategies.

While the United States and its allies were postured for the potentiality of conflict with the Soviet Union, the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation required alternative thinking with some solutions being developed by government, but many more were developed by the private sector or citizens. President Truman developed our containment strategy to prevent the expansion of communism rather than directly attack the ideology that drove it. Later, President Eisenhower understood, while developing his national security strategy, the futility in attempting to match the Soviet Union’s conventional capabilities, and that our competitive advantage was our free society and economy. As a result, our military was designed and organized to continue containment, and if necessary, a global response; however, it was the balance of using our free enterprise system and unleashing our people’s creative imagination that laid the foundation for the eventual outcome.

The Soviet Union’s Sputnik challenge provided the U.S. Government the motivation needed to compete with them on the scientific and technical front which eventually culminated with the moon landings. The symbolism of the moon landings aside, the benefit were the various spin-off technologies that propelled the private sector forward in the realm of telecommunications, computers, and etc which would reshape the ideological battle. As the people of the West became wealthier and as technologies allowed them communicate globally, to include across the iron curtain, the stark differences between East and West began to crystallize. Television programming, especially programs like MTV began to awaken the realization of many on the other side of the Iron Curtain the growing inequalities they lived under and the shallowness of the myths their governments were propagating.

As Communist nations began to crack down on their people who began to demand more freedoms (think ahead to China), attempted to censor messages coming from the West (Again China and Iran), the weapon of human rights violations began to further erode the ideological foundation of the Communist States. President Carter’s emphasis on Human Rights and President Regan’s Evil Empire speech were serious threats to the Communist World and caused cracks in the façade the communist nations portrayed of solidarity. In the end, our military power was enabler to contain Communist while our other elements of power: Diplomatic, Information, and Economic were the ones that defeated Communism. While China today remains Communist, the liberalization of its economy was as a response to the growing informational and economic threat presented by western nations in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

As a result of our success in the Cold War, what are the lessons of the Cold War that can be applied to the Global War on Terrorism? How can we reshape our current strategy of containing violent Jihadist while utilizing our strengths as a people to defeat Al Qaeda’s brand? Since Al Qaeda has spread like a cancer, and western nations are under enormous stress to repair their economies, our ability to engage Al Qaeda on the scale of Afghanistan these past 13 years has become increasingly a non-option. While the Arab Spring held potential, the lack of coordination to seize the opportunity has created unintended consequences leading to more radical Islamic groups gaining power, rather than create the space needed to support those aspiring for more moderate democratic and economic freedoms and opportunities to emerge. While acknowledging our blunder in regards to the Arab Spring, are current trends reversible to achieve a more favorable outcome?

Many acknowledge that the War on Terror is the long war, but western nations do not have the military means nor will to fight it indefinitely. New thinking is required to engage the Islamic world that incentivizes democratic expansion (on their terms) and economic opportunities that lead to the eventual societal shifts needed to bury Al-Qaeda’s brand to the dust pin of history. This is my attempt to start that conversation.