Al-Qaeda and its network of friends must be delighted these days. One foiled attack aboard an airliner and new layers of costly and inconvenient security arrangements are added. Suddenly, Yemen, a place many Americans have never heard of, has become the terror country du jour.
About 30,000 more U.S. soldiers are heading for Afghanistan, their costs all paid for with borrowed money - the U.S. being in hock way over its head, and Barack Obama having fallen for his presidential predecessor's vocabulary, describing his country's fight as a "war."
What do the United States and its friends face almost a decade after 9/11 and the start of the "war on terror"?
At least four trends are animating the jihadi threat: a backlash against globalization, whose modernity and worldliness threaten traditional, conservative cultures; an insurgency that, because of the tools of global communications, is a global one; a civil war within Islam that takes many forms, such as conflicts between Shia and Sunni and anger by Muslim ultra-fundamentalists against regimes in Muslim countries they detest; and asymmetric warfare that renders an overwhelming U.S. military power of surprisingly limited use.
The confluence of these (and other) factors has led to the creation of "the accidental guerrilla" many times over, according to terrorism specialist David Kilcullen, an Australian who's studied insurgencies up close in many countries and whose services were used by many high-ranking U.S. military and civilian officials. His book, The Accidental Guerrilla, is as good a guide to what we are facing and how to combat it (and how not to) as is likely available.
The "accidental guerrilla" arises from a four-stage strategy of al-Qaeda and like-minded groups. First, al-Qaeda moves into a remote, ungoverned or turbulent area (border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, parts of north-central Africa). Second, it uses this haven to spread violence and ideology. Third, outside forces (read U.S. and its allies) intervene to deal with al-Qaeda. Fourth, the local population becomes an "accidental guerrilla" by rejecting the outsiders' intervention and siding with al-Qaeda, especially if it's believed that al-Qaeda might eventually win the fight.
Al-Qaeda counts on its adversaries' overreaction to win "accidental guerrillas" and, over time, to disillusion Western publics who spend all this money and treasure on a "war," only to find the conflict(s) dragging on and on.
The key to breaking this cycle is winning the support of local populations: respecting their traditions, bringing them tangible help, ensuring their security, convincing them that al-Qaeda is a threat rather than an ally. Counterinsurgency, therefore, is not about killing al-Qaeda and other "scumbags," as a Canadian general once said, but of winning the local population. Body counts, in other words, don't count, a lesson conventional militaries struggle to understand.
The "accidental guerrillas," Mr. Kilcullen writes, are "people who fight us not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow but because we have invaded their space to deal with a small, extremist element that has manipulated and exploited local grievances to gain power in their societies. They fight us not because they seek our destruction but because they believe we seek theirs."
By treating Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda as the No. 1 security threat, by throwing huge resources against them, by invading Muslim countries, and by declaring a "war" to be on offer, we have turned a "mouse into an elephant."
This reasoning is arguably a bit naive, since Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda do pose mortal threats, both to Western societies through terrorist acts and to Muslim regimes. It's their world view, coupled with the convictions of the religiously righteous, that makes them dangerous, in and of themselves, and as an inspiration for certain people raised in the Muslim faith.
It is estimated that, for every dollar that al-Qaeda spent mounting the 9/11 attacks, terrorists inflicted $544,000 in damage (the cost in human lives and suffering, of course, cannot be measured). In response, the U.S. has spent $1.4-million for every al-Qaeda dollar.
This is not a war in any traditional sense, in which overcommitment, overreaction and misuse of the forms of conventional power risk alienating the very populations on whom the blunting of al-Qaeda and its allies depends.