Print This Post
20 June 2013, Gateway House

Giving up GWOT

U. S. President Barack Obama has strongly indicated a move away from the ‘Global War on Terrorism,’ – a term famously coined by his predecessor George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Given that a common definition of a ‘terrorist’ hasn’t yet been found, was the war on terrorism ever practical?

post image

The Global War on Terrorism, condensed to the ugly acronym GWOT, has been officially given up in the U.S. – the country that not too long ago had coined the term and propounded the concept. This does not mean that terrorism is ending or that it has become any less a menace. But, the doctrine of declaring a ‘global war’ against it with all its implications propounded after 9/11 by the Bush-Cheney team was given a different orientation by Obama during a speech at the National Defense University in Washington on May 23 signalling a policy change.

This change has been underreported and under-analysed by the Indian media probably since it is so U.S.-centric. But its very focus on U.S. exceptionalism, centricity, and the revision of the U.S.’s counter-terrorism doctrine has implications for many other countries, including India.

Like other concepts in politics, such as war, peace, and aggression, terrorism too is a contentious concept. Diplomats and lawyers have failed to reach a universally accepted definition of terrorism. Of the many definitions, not one is consensually codified in international law. The difficulty in definition comes from the fact that terrorism is normally linked to a political or religious cause, and the violence caused is defended by the group involved. To take the clearest examples, some Palestinian movements or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) will maintain that what they do is no doubt violent, but that it is a part of their struggle for justice and a reaction to the violence unleashed on them by the Israeli or Sri Lankan state – a form of ‘State Terrorism’. The Maoists in Chattisgarh will make a similar argument.

The elusive search for a definition has therefore been replaced by an informal understanding that we know terrorism when we see it, and that it is better to focus on ‘what is done’ rather than ‘what  is it done for – the terrorist act and not its justification. Be that as it may, is terrorism a criminal act, or an act of war, or something in between?  Such issues are of interest to scholars of ‘political violence’ (an academic subject in itself), and to constitutional lawyers like Obama.

There are good reasons to contend that major terrorist groups are engaged in a form of asymmetric warfare. Groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba or Al Qaeda are organised in many ways like a fighting force with command and control, and cadres and colonels, even though its members may not be wearing uniforms. They have arms and ammunition and planning and strategy. They certainly carry out actions that cause death and destruction. But the terrorists do not have to match the military might of the adversary; their acts are random, unpredictable, dramatic, and often against the innocent.

If terrorism is unconventional and asymmetric warfare, can there be a war against terrorism? This is a trickier question. By its very nature, terrorism is a shadowy business. Terrorists do not wear uniforms, do not fight frontally in regular formations, and do not fit the mould of ‘combatants’. A ‘war against terrorism’ is then more of a slogan than a viable tactic. Its invocation and frequent recantation by Bush and his cohorts were not helpful in the actual action against terrorism.

It is better to speak of measures against terrorism and these are multiple and not necessarily militaristic. An effective counter terrorism strategy must have several strands with force being only one of them. Intelligence, psychological tools, stopping financial flows, draining public support, and addressing the underlying context are all important, as our own debate about Maoists testifies.

The GWOT approach, led by the U.S. had consequences. It made Al Qaeda alone the centre of a globally-coordinated terrorist threat and ignored the local dimensions. The doctrine of looking at counter terrorism as a ‘war’ led to Guantanamo Bay (an extra territorial area under U.S. control, but not subject to U.S. laws), military commissions, resort to torture for extracting intelligence, and shipping of suspects to third countries under a practice known as ‘extraordinary rendition’. Some of this has arguably worked well for America, with tangible results such as the killing of Osama Bin Laden and other senior members of Al Qaeda.

But, a point has been reached in operations and in the debate over doctrines, and Obama has come to the conclusion that he need not pursue ‘a boundless and unending GWOT’. The thrust of Obama’s long speech, delivered at National Defence University after a deliberate build up and careful leaks, is to recalibrate the approach to counter terrorism to appease his core constituency, the liberals, while still retaining tools that will be required by the security establishment.

As mentioned earlier, the focus is clearly on threats to the U.S. and its increased confidence to meet them, after killing Osama Bin Laden, ‘neutralising’ several other Al Qaeda leaders and success in targeting other notable foes, has created an environment in which the U.S. can now afford to differentiate Al Qaeda loyalists from other adherents of ‘political Islam’ who may still be violent, but not necessarily against the U.S. In other words not every threat needs to be seen through the prism of a GWOT or as an affiliate of Al Qaeda. If the dimensions of the threat are manageable for the U.S., the measures can be toned down. This is the logic of several steps outlined by Obama to align U.S. counter terrorism tactics to peacetime norms.

The liberals have expressed disdain and disappointment. The following from Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, a reliable indicator of the liberal view, is illustrative: “[Obama’s]… most consequential speeches are shaped by their simultaneous affirmation of conflicting values and even antithetical beliefs, allowing listeners with irreconcilable positions to conclude that Obama agrees with them. The highly touted speech that Obama delivered on U.S. terrorism policy was a master class in that technique. If one longed to hear that the end of the “war on terror” is imminent, there are several good passages that will be quite satisfactory. If one wanted to hear that the war will continue indefinitely, perhaps even in expanded form, one could easily have found that.”

Similarly, the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes said that Obama’s speech seemed to align the president “…as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking, without undermining his administration’s operational flexibility in actual operations.

Looking at the specifics, the changed doctrine does not give up on drones, use of intrusive surveillance or other superior technologies available to the U.S. It is likely that there will be greater calculation of cost-benefit analysis in wielding such tools, but the effectiveness of drones in targeted killings with relatively lessened collateral damage,  use of other forms of air power instead of ‘boots on the ground’, and recourse to intrusive intelligence will all be retained. The recent disclosures concerning about the ‘PRISM’ surveillance programme further corroborate this approach of reliance on new technologies.

What does all this mean for us? To begin with, we must note that each terrorist entity will be seen on its terms and not clubbed under a global conglomerate. The U.S. will increasingly focus only on what is a direct and formidable threat to its interests and consider the most effective way of countering that threat at a minimal cost. Others including the Taliban or LeT will be addressed individually. Second, sophisticated technologies and massive data mining are the keys in a counter-terrorism strategy and these capabilities can be developed without compunctions. None of this is stated explicitly, of course, but for the U.S. terrorism is now likely to be more of a manageable problem and less of an existential priority.

B. S. Prakash is a former ambassador and currently a visiting professor at Jamia Milia Unversity, New Delhi.

An abridged version of this article was originally published on June 18 by The Deccan Herald, here.

This article was exclusively written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. You can read more exclusive content here.

For interview requests with the author, or for permission to republish, please contact outreach@gatewayhouse.in.

© Copyright 2013 Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized copying or reproduction is strictly prohibited.

TAGGED UNDER: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,