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July 10, 2005
What to Do
Dan Darling has an article at Winds of Change that summarizes, among other things, what to do to win the war on terror. The summary he presents of how to win the Terror Wars is from Gunaratna's Inside Al-Qaeda:
- Military and non-military responses to al-Qaeda on a region and issue-specific basis, with military responses providing the necessary security and political conditions to facilitate far reaching socio-economic, welfare, and political programs that will have a lasting impact.
- The destruction of al-Qaeda and allied infrastructure, denying them rear bases, killing their leaders, exhausting their supplies, and disrupting their recruitment.
- Ending Pakistani covert and overt military, political, and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri jihadis while mediating to provide diplomatic solution to the Kashmir issue.
- Strangling terrorist financing, tightening control over the manufacturing and supply of weapons, exchanging personnel and expertise with allies, and building common terrorist databases in the Third World.
- Developing new vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tests, enhancing medical communication and disease surveillance capabilities, and improving controls on the storage and transfer of pathogens and their equipment so as to address the threat of a catastrophic terrorist attack.
- Enhancing the protection of nuclear facilities while monitoring rogue suspected scientists and technicians.
- Killing Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Mohammed Omar in order to diffuse the momentum of the terrorist campaign [to which we can probably add Zarqawi].
- Relying on black ops operations to assassinate terrorist leaders and ideologues.
- Recruiting intelligence agents and agent-handlers within Muslim immigrant communities and sharing existing intelligence with the wider decision and policy-making community.
- Engaging al-Qaeda as an organization militarily while working non-militarily to erode its active and potential supporters by discrediting its ideology through broader action in areas where international neglect has legitimized the use of violence among many Muslims.
- Replacing unilateralism with multilateralism wherever possible and developing far-reaching policies designed to grapple with protracted conflicts and contentious issues currently fueling anti-Western sentiments by answering the real and perceived grievances of many Muslims and frustrating the current wave of open and clandestine support for al-Qaeda.
- The Islamic world as a whole must answer whether al-Qaeda and its actions are Koranic or heretical and credible Muslim communities and religious leaders must stand up and denounce bin Laden and his acolytes as power-hungry murderers rather than men of God.
- Muslim rulers and regimes must compete with Islamism and Wahhabi NGOs, building schools and community centers that both impart a modern education and instill humane, non-sectarian values.
The international community should prioritize reform Islamic education, fostering an independent media, and establishing criminal justice and prison systems that truly reflect the rule of law rather than the whims of the current ruler.
- Terrorism as a tactic must be rejected and a societal norm built against its deployment similar to that which now exist to varying degrees against slavery, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, sexism, and racism irrespective of the legitimacy of the struggle.
The thing that strikes me about this list is how much of it is being done, and how much of it is not. By and large, the things that are not getting done are those that are traditionally the province of intellectuals and NGOs, that is, the Leftist establishment. The Left wonders why so many question (or in my case deny) their patriotism, and it is this: their patriotism seems too often contingent on who wields power domestically. They were all patriotic when a Democrat was in office, but seditious the moment a Republican was in office.
It's ironic, really, because the very things that would allow voters to take the Democrats seriously are the ones that their far-Left colleagues are denying them: actively participating in the Terror Wars on our side.
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