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A Better Strategy Against Terror
March/April 2007
by Ian Shapiro '83PhD, '87JD
Ian Shapiro '83PhD, '87JD, Sterling
Professor of Political Science, is the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan
Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. This essay is adapted from
his forthcoming book Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global
Terror (Princeton
University Press).
In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the Bush administration rejected containment as an obsolete Cold War hangover.
Advocates of containment were accused of appeasement. But now we know that the
containment regime worked: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in no position to threaten
anyone, let alone the United States.
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Containment relies on economic sticks and carrots. |
Containment was devised by George
Kennan, director of policy planning for President Harry Truman, in response to
the Soviet threat. Its goal was to prevent Soviet expansion without saddling
the United States with unsustainable military obligations. The idea was to rely
on economic sticks and carrots, competition within the world communist
movement, intelligence and diplomacy, and promoting the health and vitality of
the capitalist democracies.
In the 1952 presidential election
campaign, Dwight Eisenhower and his future secretary of state, John Foster
Dulles, heaped scorn on containment, calling instead for a “rollback” of the
Soviets in Eastern Europe. Fortunately the Eisenhower administration had the
good sense to stay with containment in Europe once they came into office,
continuing a policy that is widely credited for winning the Cold War.
Modern critics of containment, who
advocate their own version of rollback in dealing with terrorist threats,
insist that that was then and this is now. Their worry is that the
transnational character of modern terrorist organizations renders obsolete a
doctrine designed for conventional, if aggressive, nation states. “Shadowy
terrorist networks,” as President Bush says, “are not easily contained.”
But this underestimates how much
terrorist groups rely, to do their business, on enabling states. How much
weaker would the PLO have been without territorial bases in Egypt, Jordan,
Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere between the 1970s and 1980s? Bin Laden and Al
Qaeda were vitally dependent on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the run-up
to 9/11. Saudi Arabia expelled them for anti-government activities in 1991 and
successfully pressured Sudan to drive them out of Khartoum three years later.
Afghanistan, where they fought the Soviets during the 1980s, was their only
sanctuary.
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Bush’s “Axis of Evil” is as containable as Reagan’s “Evil Empire.” |
Terrorist groups might not always be
feasible targets of containment, but enabling regimes certainly can be. Libya
changed its behavior in response to sanctions and other classic tools of
containment. The Taliban regime could have survived in Afghanistan had it
turned over bin Laden and closed the Al Qaeda bases as demanded by the United
States immediately following 9/11. Mullah Omar’s refusal forced the subsequent
escalation.
It is hard to imagine a terrorist
group without territorial sanctuary continuing to present a serious threat to
U.S. national security. It was, after all, rogue states that were identified by
President Bush as comprising the “Axis of Evil.” There is no intrinsic reason
to suppose them less containable than the “Evil Empire” identified by President
Reagan.
Islamists who either come to power
in national states or approach the possibility of it increasingly find
themselves at odds with transnational Islamist groups like Al Qaeda. The
business of consolidating and operating a regime is bound to involve
imperatives and compromises that the transnational group has no reason to
support and will likely reject—most obviously building broad coalitions
of national support. We saw this with Hamas’s rejection of Al Qaeda’s post-2006
election advice not to embrace a two-state solution that would implicitly
concede Israel’s sovereignty. We saw it with Iran’s cooperation with the
Northern Alliance and the United States in Afghanistan after 9/11. The Iranian
regime was no friend of Al Qaeda, and was happy to see their Taliban enablers
wiped away. And we saw the limiting case of the tension in Afghanistan itself.
Mullah Omar’s inability to reconcile the demands of being a functioning state
in the international order with continuing to provide a haven for Al Qaeda cost
his Taliban regime its existence.
Consolidation of national power often by itself has a moderating effect on the propensity to export terrorism.
Fledgling governments must solve a host of domestic problems that do not
concern terrorist organizations. We saw this with the successful integration of
Islamist groups in Turkey and Jordan. Governments also need international
cooperation to have any hope of building viable economies and modern
infrastructures. Accordingly, they are more likely to behave as the PLO did in
the mid-1990s and Hamas did during its 16-month 2005-2006 truce. The flip
side of this logic is that if Hamas’s chances of becoming a fledgling
government fade, its conflicts of interest with Al Qaeda will diminish as well.
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We should pressure the Saudis in the direction of democratic reform. |
We should welcome tensions between
national and international Islamist movements for the reasons Kennan welcomed
tensions between the Soviets and others in the international communist
movement. As agendas diverge, the resulting competition confronts the United
States with a less monolithic adversary. It also diffuses the costs of
combating international Islamist terror groups like Al Qaeda.
Until 2003, Saudi Arabia largely
went through the motions of assisting with financial counterterrorism measures
against Al Qaeda—unconcerned, perhaps, because of a tacit understanding
with bin Laden that he would keep his activities elsewhere. But that
complacency changed dramatically in May of that year, when Al Qaeda began a
series of bombings of foreign housing compounds and other targets in Saudi
Arabia itself. The bombings prompted sustained Saudi crackdowns to disrupt
domestic Al Qaeda cells, improve law enforcement, and cooperate with
intelligence on Al Qaeda fundraising and money laundering. All this activity
was noteworthy, since Saudi Arabia had been the epicenter of terrorist
financing. This is not to say that we should prop up the Saudi regime or
underwrite its domestic repression. We should use the instruments at our
disposal to pressure the Saudis in the direction of democratic reform. But, by
the same token, we should not be looking to bump off the Saudi regime. Aspiring
to do that exceeds our capacity for legitimate international action, not to
mention American resources. We should be working to help the spread of
democracy around the world, but this does not extend to gratuitous regime
change in countries that pose no threat to the United States.
A different objection to containment advanced by defenders of the Bush Doctrine is not that terrorist havens are too
strong to be deterred, but rather that they are too weak. Containment is a
state-based strategy premised on the idea that governments have control of what
goes on within their borders.
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There is no realistic alternative to containment. |
The national security challenges
posed by weak states are indeed serious. Recognizing this is, however, a giant
non sequitur as a defense of the Bush Doctrine, which offers no viable strategy
for dealing with them. On the contrary, it seems most likely to lead to their
proliferation. There are many more weak states than the United States could
possibly invade and transform into functioning ones. Notably, the United States
has not managed to do this in Afghanistan, where the writ of the Karzai
government does not run much outside Kabul five years after the Taliban was
toppled. And however many weak states there were in the world before the Iraq
invasion, there is at least one more now.
There is no realistic alternative to
containment when it comes to weak states t hat shelter terrorist networks. In
the medium term, the end of civil wars that plague many of them, help with the growth
of institutional infrastructure, and development assistance that sparks
sustainable economic growth might turn more of them into viable national
states. But in the short term the three most important steps to contain the
threats emanating from them will involve securing their borders, getting good
intelligence about the groups operating within them, and working with whatever
international agencies are seeking to resolve their internal conflicts. These
agencies, and particularly their local representatives, are likely to be
sources of reliable intelligence and of viable strategies for curtailing the
activities of terrorist groups.
Containment of weak states is
especially dependent on multilateral cooperation in the local region. Despite
the saber-rattling between the United States and Iran, it is inconceivable that
southeastern Iraq can be stabilized without Iranian cooperation—as at
least some in the Bush administration, following the Iraq Study Group, have
begun to acknowledge. Nor is northwestern Iraq likely to be secured without
Syrian help. In 2006 Iraq’s borders remained porous to terrorist traffic in
both directions.
Achieving the regional cooperation
needed to stabilize weak states always requires cooperation with local
neighbors who have the most at stake, the most relevant information, and often
the capacity to be spoilers if they choose. Threatening the governments in the
neighborhood unnecessarily and advertising hopes for domino effects of
regime-toppling are scarcely the way to achieve that cooperation.
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