The End of the "War on Terror?"

Last May, at the renowned US military academy of West Point, President Barack Obama introduced the new US national security doctrine, formally expressed in the National Security Strategy 2010 released by the White House later that month.

As is already tradition among foreign policy analysts, journalists and think tankers, a whole range of analysis was published about the new strategy. A particular point of general interest is usually to identify what are the elements of change, and also the elements of continuity, in relation to the previous national security strategy.

Whether or not the recently released document represents such a break from the Bush administration’s 2002 and especially the 2006 National Security Strategies remains an issue of debate. In his speech, Obama tried to point out how different this strategy is when compared with his predecessor’s. Clearly, there are some aspects to it that do mark a shift, especially regarding the emphasis on multilateralism as opposed to unilateralism, diplomacy over the use of military force, and in the explicit recognition of the limits of American might.

In addition to Obama, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, US National Security Advisor James Jones, and John Brennan, Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser, also previewed the new strategy. Brennan in particular highlighted that the US is involved in a conflict with Al-Qaeda, and not in a “war on terror.” In the 2006 National Security Strategy, expressions like “the war against terror,” “the war against terrorists,” “the terrorist enemy,” and so forth could be found all across the document.

This expression “war on terror,” which reflects a particular view of the world and how to deal with it, proved very damaging for the US image and interests across the wider Middle East.

Brennan advocated the abandonment of this expression as early as 2009 in his first speech after joining the Obama administration. At the time, Brennan argued that the new approach would focus on the “root causes of terrorism,” namely economic and social causes that breed extremism. This view is in sharp contrast with the Bush administration’s idea that terrorism was caused by tyrannical regimes in the Middle East.

It remains to be seen if the dropping of the expression “war on terror” corresponds to actions by the Obama administration that really establish a change of course in this regard. There is an effort in the new document to stress clearly that the new administration is not at war with Islam—“…this is not a global war against a tactic—terrorism or a religion—Islam. We are at war with a specific network, Al-Qaeda, and its terrorist affiliates who support efforts to attack the United States, our allies, and partners.”

Although the expression “war on terror” has been dropped, there is still some doubt about if the idea behind the expression is still present in the new strategy—“For nearly a decade, our nation has been at war with a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” Indeed, the question remains if the Obama administration is aware that the wrong response to extremism only breeds more extremism.

In order to end “The War on Terror,” the Obama administration has to do more than remove a word from a document. One of the flags of the Obama presidential campaign was the closure of Guantanamo, the darkest symbol of a “whatever it takes” approach of Bush’s “war on terror.” This proved to be a much harder task than initially thought, and the deadline to close it in January this year was not met. The question of what do to with the inmates that remain there is only one of the puzzles the Obama administration needs to solve. Sending the many Yemeni nationals still in Guantanamo back to Yemen is certainly not an option. Although it was an invention of the Bush administration to transform this prison into a torture camp where “terror” was fought with “terror,” the inability to keep the pledge of closing the prison has backfired on the Obama administration.

There is another development which is at least as damaging for the US’s long term interests as their inability to close Guantanamo, and that is the huge increase of drone strikes in Pakistan since the Obama administration took office. As a past article in The Majalla has argued, while “counter-terrorism experts find this program a real asset, some counterinsurgency specialists have been firm in pointing out that it sends the wrong message to the Pakistani people.” Various warnings have been made about the potential boomerang effect of this strategy, including by David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, of the Center for a New American Strategy, and by Professor Fawaz Gerges from the London School of Economics, in a recent article in Newsweek.

This strategy, responsible for the killing of too many civilians, is contradictory to numerous ideas put forward in the new National Security Strategy, namely “the strengthening of international norms on behalf of human rights,” or the “efforts to live our own values, and uphold the principles of democracy in our own society, underpin our support for the aspirations of the oppressed abroad, who know they can turn to America for leadership based on justice and hope.” It is particularly hard to see how the bombing of villages in tribal areas of Pakistan by unpiloted US drones can contribute to the goal contained in the new strategy of “build[ing] positive partnerships with Muslim communities around the world.”

Until at least these two issues—the closure of Guantanamo and the restrain in drone strikes—are addressed, the “war on terror” isn’t really over, it just changed its face.

Manuel Almeida