Every war must end. To emerge as a victor presupposes a clear political idea of what constitutes victory. Without reliable and fixed political targets to define the limits of the war, how will we know how the war is going, let alone if we have won? To win wars it is not enough to simply fight, you need to know when you have fought enough.
The recent Presidential election could be considered a referendum on the war on terror as it has hitherto been conducted. The Bush administration claims that over 75 percent of al-Qaeda's strength has been depleted and that together with Saddam Hussein's removal there are strong signs that America is winning the war on terror.
The claim that "75 percent" of al-Qaeda has been eliminated requires the condition of a static universe. However, the world is never static. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere has certainly been disrupted. However, the rising number of terror attacks worldwide attributable to it or its affiliates is surely an indication that it has capably reorganized and raised new recruits.
Treating the war in Afghanistan as synonymous with that in Iraq is a leap of political imagination. The Sept. 11 Congressional Commission has commented that there was no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and the perpetrators of the attacks on Sept. 11, nor have any weapons of mass destruction been discovered. Yet, blood and money are being spent in Iraq for a cause that has become conflated with the war on terror, without basis.
What had been a successful and justified retaliation against the perpetrators of the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole, the Embassy bombings in Africa, and the Sept. 11 attacks took a radical turn into an open ended conflict, most visibly with the invasion of Iraq. The miscalculation on how successful that war would be is still playing itself out a year after the invasion and over three years since Sept. 11.
This is not to deny that terrorism must at some level be met with the threat of force. Indeed, effective violent suppression measures are key tools in the fight against extremists. Intelligence infiltration and covert action are ugly but essential weapons against the shadow warriors of terrorism. However, so are diplomacy, education, economic progress and civil stability. The Bush administration seems to place the ideology of democracy ahead of these fundamental measures of persuasion.
They believe that the "elixir" of democracy is enough to cure the evils of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and even Anti-Americanism. While it is possible to agree intellectually that democracy is the most empowering political agency available, the Bush administration appears to be blind to the damage that the violent methods required to give birth to democracy do to the cause. In other words, means matter as much as the ends.
Where it is an indigenously generated political action, Democracy has a standing chance of taking root and consolidating. However, where it is imposed and engineered from without, democracy can prove to be stillborn. Even the seemingly positive outcome of the recent Presidential electoral process in Afghanistan can be misleading. It took place under the guarantee of American political, economic, and military support. What will happen when this is gone? How firmly can President Kharzai govern his provinces? Add to this ambiguity the fact that Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, has not been occupied.
The violence in Iraq is operating politically at many levels. Only the most obvious is aimed at the American and Coalition forces. Less clear is the internal struggle between religious factions to achieve political dominance. In between these layers of contest, transnational terrorists in the al Qaeda mold function to radicalize the religious base towards its own grand strategy ends.
As with the Johnson administration and Vietnam in the 1960s, the current administration refuses to allow the contention that the insurgents are nationalists and insists on lumping them all together as "terrorists" and "killers." The result is to obscure the political dichotomy between the world that the administration is spending money and blood to achieve, and the world that walks the streets of Iraq each day.
This dichotomy was clearly expressed in President Bush's second inaugural speech. In the rhetorical world of his vision, no moral or political ambiguities were evident, but there also no mention of Iraq or Afghanistan. In such an abstract world, the guns cannot fall silent because no one in the administration is connecting the politically pleasing sound of their firing with the politically less palatable consequences of the fall of the shots.
Devadas Krishnadas is graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
