NEW YORK--We've killed thousands of Muslims and taken over two of
their countries. We're spending billions of dollars to make it
easier for our government to spy on us. But we haven't caught Osama,
Al Qaeda is doing better than ever and airport security is still a
sick joke. So when are Americans going to demand a real war
on terrorism?
Recent suicide bombings in Riyadh and Casablanca proved with
bloody eloquence that Al Qaeda and similar extremist groups are
anything but "on the run," as George W. Bush puts it. Bush's tactics
are a 100 percent failure, yet his band of clueless Christian
soldiers continues to go after mosquitoes with shotguns. "So far,"
Bush furiously spun after the latest round of attacks, "nearly
one-half of Al Qaeda's senior operatives have been captured or
killed," promising to "remain on the hunt until they are all brought
to justice."
Can Bush really be this stupid? All underground organizations,
including Al Qaeda, employ a loose hierarchical structure. No
individual member is indispensable, so the capture of even a
high-ranking official cannot compromise the group. Each lost member
is instantly replaced by the next man down in his cell. It doesn't
matter whether we catch half, three-quarters or all of Al Qaeda's
leadership--hunting down individual terrorists is an expensive and
pointless game of whack-a-mole. Only Allah knows how many eager
recruits have sprung up, hydra-like, to fill Khalid Sheikh
Mohammad's flip-flops.
Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham caught
heat for calling the war on Iraq (news
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sites) "a distraction" from the war on terrorism, but he was far
too kind. The invasions of Afghanistan (news
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sites) and Iraq have replaced a real war on terrorism,
and they've vastly increased the likelihood of future September
11's. Bombing Afghanistan scattered bin Laden, his lieutenants and
their foot soldiers everywhere from Chechnya (news
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sites) to Sudan to China's Xinjiang province; fleeing Talibs
spread new anti-American seed cells while the Taliban and other
radical groups retain their pre-9/11 Pakistani headquarters. With
radical Shiite clerics like the Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim
poised to fill the post-Saddam power vacuum, Iraq could become a
Shia version of Taliban-era Afghanistan: an anarchic collection of
fiefdoms run by extremist warlords happy to host training camps for
terrorist organizations.
"We're much safer," Tom Ridge claims. If this is safety, give me
danger.
Taking over Iraq and Afghanistan didn't score us any new fans
among Muslims. We could have won them over with carefully crafted
occupations, but chose instead to allow the two states to
disintegrate into chaos and civil war.
Rarely have incompetence and cheapness been wed with such
impressively disastrous results. In Afghanistan, we paid off
warlords whom we should have dropped bombs upon. Puppet president
Hamid Karzai is threatening to abdicate his Kabul city-state because
"there is no money in the government treasury." One of Karzai's
ministers warns The New York Times: "Very soon we will see
armed conflict."
As USA Today reported on May 7, "Iraqis say they view the
U.S. military with suspicion, anger and frustration. Many even say
life was in some ways better under the regime of Saddam Hussein (news
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sites): the streets, they say, were safter, jobs more secure,
food more plentiful and electricity and water supplies reliable."
That's not the message we want on Al Jazeera TV--whose Baghdad
correspondent, in the ultimate case of PR gone bad, we assassinated
in Iraq.
"Governance is a long-term process," says Bush Administration
reconstruction official Chris Milligan, but that's just another lame
excuse. The truth is that we haven't even tried to restore
law and order, much less govern. The Pentagon (news
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sites) plans to leave just two divisions--30,000 men--to patrol
Iraq. That's significantly fewer than the 50,000 peacekeeping troops
NATO (news
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sites) stationed in Kosovo--a nation less than one-fifth
the size of Iraq. 95 percent of Afghanistan has no peacekeepers
whatsoever, with fewer than 8,000 in Kabul.
We're sleeping soundly--do you think Scott Peterson (news
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sites) really did it?--but the guys who hate us so much
they're willing to die to make their point are industriously
exploiting our stupidity to sign up new jihadis. "Since the United
States invaded Iraq in March," the Times quoted top
Administration honchos on May 16, "the [Al Qaeda] network has
experienced a spike in recruitment. 'There is an increase in radical
fundamentalism all over the world,' said a senior counterterrorism
official based in Europe."
Ariel Sharon (news
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sites) offers living proof that tough-guy tactics strengthen,
rather than weaken terrorist groups. Each time Israel assassinates a
Palestinian leader or demolishes an Arab home, moderates angered by
those actions become radicalized. Israelis and Palestinians have
suffered through this endless attack-retaliation-attack cycle for
decades. Surely we can learn from their pain.
It's still early in this game. Shut down the bloated and
pointless Homeland Security bureaucracy--since it doesn't include
the CIA (news
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sites) and FBI (news
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sites), it didn't stop interagency squabbling--and apply the
money we'll save into a fully-funded rebuilding of Iraq and
Afghanistan. Stop squandering money and our civil rights on
boneheaded data-mining schemes like Total Information Awareness (now
renamed Terrorism Information Awareness), and recruit some
old-fashioned spies to infiltrate extremist groups. Charge the
Guantánamo detainees with a crime or send them home; their legal
limbo is an international embarrassment. Stop fingerprinting Muslim
tourists--it's insulting and does nothing to prevent terrorists from
entering the country. Quit supporting brutal anti-American military
dictators like Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, whose oppressed subjects
rightly blame us for their misery.
"The only way to deal with [terrorists] is to bring them to
justice," Bush says. "You can't talk to them, you can't negotiate
with them, you must find them." He couldn't be more mistaken. We'll
never find them all. And while we shouldn't negotiate with those who
call us the Great Satan, we must talk to the millions of
Muslims who watch the news every night. Their donations keep Al
Qaeda going. If we want them to stop financing the terrorists, we'd
better stop acting like a Great Satan.
(Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the
American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the
underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real
motivations behind the war on terrorism. Ordering information is
available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.)
