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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Yet military breakthroughs have often been achieved by weaker powers. Nowhere was this more evident than a year ago, when 19 suicidal men in civilian clothes using e-mail, the Internet, elementary flight instructions, and tradesmen's tools converted kerosene-burning commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction. There was an evil genius about it. It was a shocking initiation into the 21st century, so shocking that it left some with the naive belief that it will never happen again or that, if it does, it will not be in their cities. But does anyone seriously believe that the bin Ladens of the world are done with us?
Our massive military and technological superiority did not protect us from this non-arrayed, asymmetrical, iconoclastic, new form of conflict. Indeed, technology may have seduced us into assuming security. While we poured enormous capital into national missile defense -- trying to hit a bullet with a bullet -- our enemies turned our own technology against us. Faith in technology can blind us to the necessity of innovation in the age of the transformation of war; faith in technology handcuffed our imagination and lulled us to sleep.
We're now trying to force new forms of conflict into traditional categories so that we can try to understand and respond to it. Our response to the first terrorist attack was to declare "war on terrorism." But that is a two-front war being fought on one front only. So far in Afghanistan, our military has replaced a repressive theocracy with a less repressive, but still tribal, form of government. But the fate of the most wanted man on earth is still uncertain, and our leaders tell us al-Qaida cells still operate in the U.S. and elsewhere. And we are on the brink of invading Iraq without adequate preparation -- as the Council on Foreign Relations' report in October documented -- for what experts believe will be inevitable retaliatory attacks on the U.S. from radical fundamentalist groups. So it is far too early to declare victory in this war.
Meanwhile, the "warriors" rounded up in this conflict and detained at Guantánamo are denied warrior status. They are also denied criminal status and thus the rights inherent in our criminal justice system. If they are not warriors, and they are not criminals, what are they? The answer is consequential in that it may contain a clue to the broader question of how to define security in the age of this new conflict. We don't know what to call the "detainees" because we don't know exactly what they've done. The Taliban fought for a theocratic regime that harbored an anti-Western, anti-democratic, anti-liberal radical fundamentalist terrorist group. Are they warriors or are they criminals? Or are they something else? Are they the wave of the future? Will conflict in the 21st century resemble more the high-tech games of "Star Wars" or the bloody, ruthless, barbaric combat of the 12th century Assassins?
If the return of the Assassins is the wave of the future, and I believe it is, this has dramatic consequences for how we define security and how we seek to achieve it. There are two basic schools of thought about dealing with terrorism. One school believes the threat is inevitable and that we should crush it, including preemptively, in places like Iraq. The other believes that we should try to understand the nature of the threat with considerably more thoughtfulness and eliminate, to the degree possible, its causes. The first school of thought has the virtue of simplicity. The second has the much greater chance of ultimate success.
The preemption approach, moreover, has long-term foreign policy consequences. For example, in Afghanistan, we armed the mujahedin to fight the Soviets in the 1980s. Then, when the Soviets left, we rode away and the Taliban took over and eventually provided hospitality to al-Qaida. Let's say we mount a major invasion of Iraq. And let's say we succeed in driving Saddam Hussein out -- to join Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. Then what? If we ride away again, we leave behind a much bigger breeding ground for terrorists that will haunt us in years to come. If we stay, we will be there for a very, very long time.
This new century requires a much clearer understanding of new threats and the causes of those threats than our leaders seem interested in pursuing. Who exactly is our enemy and why does he hate us? Unlike the clear-cut 20th century ideological struggle between democracy and communism, the role of poverty, disease, and despair becomes much more central. The role of cultural difference becomes much more crucial -- "Take your filthy movies and go home," cry those who resent us and our popular culture. And the role of resentment -- of our wealth, of our power, of our willful consumption of resources, of our arrogance -- becomes a much greater factor.
It does not go without notice in the world, especially the impoverished world, that the United States consumes a quarter of the world's energy and produces a quarter of the world's pollution and trash. And to say that this will all be overlooked because multitudes of people would like to live in the United States is to miss the point; we are seen by many not only to be rich but also to be arrogant, arbitrary and wholly self-interested.
Here let's return to the four revolutions I outlined at the outset. If globalization opens an even wider gap between haves and have-nots, it will increase poverty and despair, widen cultural clashes, and dramatically increase resentment against us. If the information revolution also adds a digital divide between the computer literate with future opportunities and the computer illiterate without those opportunities, it will swell the swamp of despair, the breeding pool of future terrorists. How short is the time before suicidal young people with nothing to gain and nothing to lose blow themselves up in U.S. shopping malls in a tragic search for martyrdom?
This new age requires, at the very least, a new definition of security and, to achieve it, a toolbox filled with more than weapons. National security in the 21st century will require economic and political tools, not simply military ones. Trade and aid programs must become more grassroots and human scale than top-down and bureaucratic. For example, micro-loan programs directed at home, land, and small business ownership have proved enormously promising in several countries in Asia and Latin America. And in the political arena, our diplomacy must once again be based on the principles underlying our Constitution and nation -- principles of honor, of humanity, of respect for difference -- and our diplomacy must be aimed at people not just governments. We can explain our principles and ideals much better than we have been; but we must then also be prepared to live up to them. The ideals of democracy are not marketed: They are lived.
