Remaking alliances for the war on terrorism

Abstract

This essay contends that allies are vital for counterterrorism, but what we ask of them and their institutional form is quite different from what was asked of traditional alliance partners during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Despite these differences, some of the alliance dilemmas that plagued the United States in the past are likely to remain, though they will have different manifestations relevant to the war on terrorism. This essay concludes by arguing that, for purposes of the war on terrorism, the list of key allies has shifted and offers recommendations for improving US alliances.

Key words:

• Terrorism
• alliances
• counterterrorism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nora Bensahel, Michael Brown, David Edelstein, Sara Bjerg Moller, Andrew Pierre, and Jeremy Shapiro and an anonymous reviewer for their help and comments on previous versions of this article.

Notes

¹Eliot Cohen, ‘World War IV’, Wall Street Journal, 20 Nov. 2001, A18.

²The literature on alliances is voluminous. Leading works include: Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1987); Glenn H. Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1997); Glenn H. Snyder, ‘The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics’, World Politics 36/4 (July 1984), 461–95; Anton DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1987); Steven David, Choosing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP 1991); Fred Chernoff, After Bipolarity: The Vanishing Threat, Theories of Cooperation and the Future of the Atlantic Alliances (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press 1995); Benjamin Miller, When Opponents Cooperate: Great Power Conflict and Collaboration in World Politics (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press 1995); Randall K. Schweller, ‘Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In’, International Security 19/1 (Spring 1994), 72–107; Kevin Narizny, ‘The Political Economy of Alignment: Great Britain's Commitments to Europe, 1905–1939’, International Security 27/4 (Spring 2003), 184–219; and Dan Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances, and World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1996).

³National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington DC: Norton 2004), 379.

⁴In a speech at Georgetown University on 18 Jan. 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for ‘transformational diplomacy’ and restructuring the State Department to focus less on old concerns and more on countries relevant to counterterrorism as well as other emerging issues. See ‘Transformational Diplomacy’ available at <www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/59306.htm>.

⁵Peter Baker, ‘Old Enemies Enlist in US Terror War’, Washington Post, 1 Jan. 2004, A18.

⁶Paul R. Pillar, ‘Counterterrorism after Al Qaeda’, Washington Quarterly 27/3 (Summer 2004), 106.

⁷It is important to note several questions this essay deliberately does not address. Most important, this essay focuses on the role of alliances and terrorism and does not try to answer the question ‘what should the overall US alliance structure be?’ Terrorism is only one of many US interests. Sorting out the relative priority of counterterrorism versus other concerns such as China, Russia, proliferation, and so on is a massive undertaking in its own right. This essay hopes to contribute to the discussion by laying out the distinct demands of the war on terrorism, a first step toward the broader undertaking of designing an alliance structure that reflects many of the competing demands on the United States.

⁸For example, Eugene Gholz, Daryl Press, and Harvey Sapolsky answer the ‘should’ question by calling for a decrease in US alliance commitments abroad. See ‘Come Home, America: The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation’, International Security 21/4 (Spring 1997), 8.

⁹Walt, for example, examines the question of how states in general response to threats and draws general conclusions. Snyder's work focuses on a multipolar and anarchic system and is concentrated on the clash of conventional arms. Snyder, Alliance Politics, 129; Snyder's article ‘The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics’ is also focused on a multipolar world. Dan Reiter defines an alliance as involving a ‘commitment to contribute military assistance’, a focus that is less useful for the effort against terrorism. Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs, 58. Walt and Posen note that alliance building often involves military assets of various sorts (Walt, Origins of Alliances, 149; Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1984), 62. Patricia Weitsman also stresses the military element of alliances in her definition. Patricia A. Weitsman, ‘Intimate Enemies: The Politics of Peacetime Alliances’, Security Studies 7/1 (Autumn 1997), 158, footnote 3. For valuable work on Asia that offsets much of the traditional focus on Europe, see David Kang, ‘Hierarchy, Balancing, and Empirical Puzzles in Asian International Relations,’International Security 28/3 (Winter 2003/2004), 165–80 and Jennifer Lind, ‘Pacifism or Passing the Buck? Testing Theories of Japanese Security Policy’, International Security 29/1 (Summer 2004), 92–121. It is worth noting that perhaps the most important work on alliances, Walt's Origins of Alliances, draws primarily on patterns in the Middle East for its conclusions.

¹⁰The most serious effort to take on the question of how alliances should shift is a series of RAND studies led by Nora Bensahel. See in particular Nora Bensahel, ‘A Coalition of Coalitions: International Cooperation against Terrorism’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29/1 (January–February 2006), 35–49; Nora Bensahel, The Counterterror Coalitions: Cooperation with Europe, NATO, and the European Union (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2003); and C. Christine Fair, ‘The Counterterror Coalition: Cooperation with India and Pakistan’ (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2004).

¹¹Stephen M. Walt, ‘Why Alliances Endure or Collapse’, Survival 39/1 (Spring 1997), 157.

¹²A useful typology can be found in Snyder, Alliance Politics, 6–16.

¹³See James Morrow, ‘Arms Versus Allies: Trade-offs in the Search for Security’, International Organization 47/2 (Spring 1993), 207–33.

¹⁴Snyder, Alliance Politics, 44.

¹⁵This excludes neutrality on the low end of the spectrum and international organization with near-universal membership on the other. Much of my thinking on the subject of alliance tightness and the resulting power came from an unpublished work by Derek Eaton during his time at the RAND Corporation.

¹⁶See <www.upu.int/> for more details.

¹⁷Walt, Origins of Alliances, 263–66.

¹⁸Neutrality or ‘non-action’ (such as not providing terrorists with weapons of mass destruction) is not explicitly addressed.

¹⁹Stopping the financing of terrorism is excluded, though many would include it as a top US priority as reducing Al Qaeda and other terrorists' assets inhibits the effectiveness of their organization. However, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States contends that while combating terrorist financing is often declared to be effective, ‘In reality, completing choking off the money to Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups has been essentially impossible.’ John Roth, Douglas Greenburg, and Serena Wille, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Monograph on Terrorist Financing: Staff Report to the Commission (Washington DC: 2004), 2. Many of the easiest ways to disrupt financing were used successfully after 9/11, but today much of the financing is done through illicit channels or through other means that are hard to halt. The monograph goes on to note, however, that tracking financing is a vital way of gaining intelligence on terrorists – thus, on balance, I consider stopping financing as part of the intelligence effort though it can be legitimately viewed as a category in its own right.

²⁰Almost every reader will quarrel over the specifics of this list of strategy components, the prioritization of the goals, and whether vital changes are necessary. Perhaps the most direct document is the White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, which calls for the United States to work with allies to ‘ defeat terrorist organizations of global reach’; to ‘ deny further sponsorship, support, and sanctuary to terrorists’; to ‘ diminish the underlying conditions that terrorists seek to exploit’; and to ‘ defend the United States’ through better homeland security. The White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (Feb. 2003), 11–12. Italics and bold in the original.

²¹The US Government Accountability Office found that the United States has issued many strategy documents since 9/11 that address issues from aviation security to the proper role of military forces. The documents, however, often disagree or at times contain important gaps. See Statement of Norman Rabkin, ‘Homeland Security: Observations on National Strategies Related to Counterterrorism’, 22 Sept. 2004, available at <www.gao.gov/new.items/d041075t.pdf>.

²²For the best review on the intelligence needs with regard to Al Qaeda, see Paul Pillar, ‘Intelligence’, in Audrey Kurth Cronin and Jim Ludes (eds.), Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy. (Washington DC: Georgetown UP 2004), 115–39.

²³See Barry Posen, ‘The Struggle against Terrorism: Grand Strategy, Strategy, and Tactics’, International Security 26/3 (Winter 2001/2002), 41.

²⁴National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, 366; Walt, ‘Beyond Bin Ladin’, 62; and Richard Clarke and Barry McCaffrey, ‘NATO's Role in Confronting International Terrorism’, The Atlantic Council (June 2004), 6.

²⁵National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, 362. Italics in the original. Academic experts share this criticism. As Stephen Van Evera has argued, ‘Defining it as a broad war on terror was a tremendous mistake. It should have been a war on Al Qaeda. Don't take your eye off the ball.’ As quoted in Nicholas Lehmann, ‘The War on What?’The New Yorker, 16 Sept. 2002.

²⁶In almost all these cases, the United States was ‘opposed’ to the group and cooperating with the governments opposing the groups to varying degrees. Since 9/11, US condemnations of Israeli, Russian, or other government mistakes have diminished, but this is only a shift in degree.

²⁷For a review, see Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes (Washington DC: Brassey's 2002), pp.138–41 and 197–205. Almost all insurgent movements use terrorism as well as guerrilla warfare. In my judgment, a pure terrorist group is one that does not use guerrilla warfare, but many groups – including some of the most troubling terrorist groups like the Lebanese Hizballah or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam – use both.

²⁸National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Monograph on Terrorist Financing, 4.

²⁹Roger Owen, State Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (NY: Routledge 1992), 166–96.

³⁰Stephen M. Walt, ‘Beyond bin Ladin: Reshaping US Foreign Policy’, International Security 26/3 (Winter 2001/2002), 62.

³¹See Stephen Flynn, America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism (NY: HarperCollins 2004). Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, ‘Changing Minds, Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for US Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World’, 1 Oct. 2003, 8.

³²Pillar, ‘Intelligence’, 115.

³³Ibid., author's italics.

³⁴Posen, ‘The Struggle against Terrorism’, 43; Jennifer Sims, ‘Foreign Intelligence Liaison – Devils, Deals, and Details’, (forthcoming). Allies, however, may exaggerate Al Qaeda's links to local groups, leading to skewed US assessments of the danger if there is no information to vet the liaison information. For example, the United States may have exaggerated Al Qaeda's links to al-Ittihaad al-Islamiyya in Somalia due to information fed to Washington by the Ethiopian government. ‘Somalia’, The Economist Intelligence Unit: Country Profile 2004, (London: Economist Intelligence Unit Ltd. 2004) available at <http://www.eui.com>.

³⁵Dana Priest and Joe Stephens, ‘Secret World of US Interrogation’, Washington Post, 11 May 2004, A01.

³⁶Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, ‘US Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations’, Washington Post, 26 Dec. 2002, A01.

³⁷Former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet singled out Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, the UAE, Oman, and Pakistan for praise in his testimony on the worldwide threat in 2004. George Tenet, ‘The Worldwide Threat 2004: Challenges in a Changing Global Context’, Testimony of Director of Central Intelligence before the Senate Armed Services Committee, 9 March 2004. See also Fair, ‘India and Pakistan’, 18.

³⁸Craig Whitlock, ‘French Push Limits in Fight on Terrorism’, Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2004, p. A01.

³⁹Bob Woodward, ‘50 Countries Detain 360 Suspects at CIA's Behest’, Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2001, A01. Paul Pillar is critical of the use of law enforcement techniques in isolation but notes they can be a valuable component of a broader counterterrorism strategy. See Paul Pillar, Terrorism and US Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Brookings 2001), 80–89.

⁴⁰On questions of insurgency in general, see Ian F. W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (New York: Routledge 2003); D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton UP 1988); Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance (New York: Free Press 1977); George K. Tanham and Dennis J. Duncanson, ‘Some Dilemmas of Counterinsurgency’, Foreign Affairs 48 (Jan. 1970), 113–22; William Odom, On Internal War: American and Soviet Approaches to Third World Clients and Insurgents (Durham, NC: Duke UP 1992); Harry Eckstein (ed.), Internal War: Problems and Approaches (New York: Free Press 1964); and Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr, Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts (Chicago: Markham 1970).

⁴¹See Daniel Byman, Deadly Dynamics: States that Sponsor Terrorism (New York: Cambridge UP 2005) for more on this issue.

⁴²Daniel Byman, ‘Confronting Passive Sponsors of Terrorism’, Saban Center Analysis Paper no. 4 (Washington DC: Brookings 2005), 31.

⁴³James Dobbins et al., America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2003), 149–66.

⁴⁴James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, ‘Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States’, International Security 28/4 (Spring 2004), 9.

⁴⁵Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might (New York: Cambridge UP 2002), 156–57. Such added legitimacy, of course, is not necessary for action. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq occurred without significant allied support but nevertheless had enough political support in the United States.

⁴⁶Jeremy Shapiro and Benedicte Suzan, ‘The French Experience of Counter-terrorism’, Survival 45/1 (Spring 2003), 81.

⁴⁷ CIA Factbook 2004 (Washington DC 2004), available at <www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook>.

⁴⁸Desmond Butler and Don Van Natta Jr, ‘Trail of Anti-US Fighters Said to Cross Europe to Iraq’, New York Times, 6 Dec. 2003, A1.

⁴⁹Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 2003), 121–88.

⁵⁰Despite the length of the insurgency, both the number and motives of the various insurgent groups in Iraq remains confusing. See Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, ‘US Pushes Upward Its Estimate of Rebels in Iraq’, New York Times, 22 Oct. 2004, A1.

⁵¹‘Faithful, but not fanatics’, The Economist, 28 June 2003, 50.

⁵²David, Choosing Sides, 6.

⁵³Snyder, Alliance Politics, 307–72.

⁵⁴On the importance of the Middle East, Western Europe, and parts of Asia see Robert J. Art, A Grand Strategy for America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2003), 8. Layne offers a critique of how to defend these areas. See Christopher Layne, ‘From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing’, International Security 22/1 (Summer 1997), 98–99.

⁵⁵Some scholars even predicted that after the end of the Cold War great powers would not intervene in the developing world unless they had an economic interest to do so. James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, ‘A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era’, International Organization 46/2 (Spring 1992), 486.

⁵⁶Barry Posen notes that the United States is largely unmatched in most areas of conventional capability. See ‘Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of US Hegemony’, International Security 28/1 (Summer 2003), 5–46. Posen, however, also contends that peacekeeping is heavily troop intensive and thus operations like Iraq may prove a strain on US forces that inhibit other missions.

⁵⁷For a review of how to work with NATO in the war on terrorism, see Bensahel, The Counterterror Coalitions. Bensahel points out that NATO or other allied conventional assets may ‘backfill’ US forces in places such as the Balkans, freeing them up for operations linked to the effort against terrorism.

⁵⁸Posen, for example, calls for reorienting several light conventional units toward the counterterrorist mission. Posen, ‘The Struggle against Terrorism’, 4–48.

⁵⁹For example, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared Central Asia is now of ‘strategic importance to US foreign policy initiatives’. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Statement to the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, 12 Feb. 2003, available at <www.house.gov/international_relations/108/powe0212.htm>.

⁶⁰Shapiro and Suzan, ‘The French Experience of Counter-terrorism’, 70–74.

⁶¹‘Bin Ladin's Message’, 12 Nov. 2002, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2455845.stm>.

⁶²Given that the United States is squarely in Al Qaeda's sights, it may prove difficult for Washington to dodge Al Qaeda's bullets. But even here it is not impossible. India, Russia, and of course Israel are high on Al Qaeda's demonology, and the organization is constantly wrestling with its regional components over which countries and theaters are the proper ones. Al Qaeda attacked Israeli targets in Kenya and assisted the attack in Egypt, while it has championed Kashmiri and Chechen groups, a few of which (such as Lashkar-e-Tayyeba) share much of its ideology. In Saudi Arabia, for example, anti-government insurgents have called for fighters not to go to Iraq, declaring that the struggle against the Al Saud is more important. International Crisis Group, ‘Saudi Arabia Backgrounder: Who Are the Islamists?’, 21 Sept. 2004, 16.

⁶³Snyder, Alliance Politics, 145.

⁶⁴David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books 2004), 40.

⁶⁵Snyder, Alliance Politics, 151. See also Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser, ‘An Economic Theory of Alliances’, Review of Economics and Statistics 48/3 (August 1966), pp.266–79. Walt contends this generalization is likely to hold with regard to the war on terrorism. Walt, ‘Beyond bin Laden’, 65.

⁶⁶As quoted in Thomas Christensen, ‘Perceptions and Alliances in Europe, 1865–1940’, International Organization 51/1 (Winter 1997), 90.

⁶⁷Jusuf Wanandi, ‘A Global Coalition against International Terrorism’, International Security 26/4 (Spring 2002), 187.

⁶⁸John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: OUP 1997), 167.

⁶⁹David, Choosing Sides, 196.

⁷⁰This was formalized as a strategic partnership with Uzbekistan in March 2002. See <http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/202/8736.htm>.

⁷¹‘The Great Leap West’, The Economist, 28 Aug. 2004, 38.

⁷²World Islamic Front Statement, 23 Feb., 1998, available at <www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm>.

⁷³See in particular Bin Laden's ‘Letter to America’, 24 Nov. 2002, available at <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,845725,00.html>.

⁷⁴Weitsman, ‘Intimate Enemies’, 156.

⁷⁵Art makes a strong case that long-standing US alliances have a profound socialization effect. See Art, A Grand Strategy for America, 163.

⁷⁶Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2004), pp.241–87.

⁷⁷The linkage between terrorism and political opportunities has some support but requires further research. Terrorists often choose violence (and are more likely to gain support when they use it) when other means of political expression are not available. See in particular Martha Crenshaw, ‘The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as a Product of Strategic Choice’, in Walter Reich (ed.), Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP 1998), 7–24.

⁷⁸Walt makes this point about regimes in the Arab world during the Cold War. Walt, Origins of Alliances, 149.

⁷⁹The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, ‘A Year after Iraq War Mistrust of American in Europe ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists’, 16 March 2004, available at <http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=206> and the supplementary Pew report of the same day, ‘Additional Findings and Analysis’, available at <http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=796>.

⁸⁰C. Christine Fair, ‘Militant Recruitment in Pakistan: Implications for Al Qaeda and Other Organizations’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27/6 (Nov./Dec. 2004), 8.

⁸¹Fortunately, intelligence sharing is often somewhat independent of the strength of the overall bilateral relationship. See also Sims, ‘Foreign Intelligence Liaison’.

⁸²Fair, ‘India and Pakistan’, 30–32.

⁸³R.J. Overy, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Longman 1998), 20.

⁸⁴Fair, ‘India and Pakistan’, 9.

⁸⁵Anonymous, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror (Washington DC: Brassey's 2004), 54–55.

⁸⁶Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, ‘Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity’, International Organization 44/2 (Spring 1990) pp.139. The authors contend that chain gangs are not inevitable under bipolarity and that “buck-passing” is more likely.

⁸⁷Snyder, ‘Alliance Security Dilemma’, 467.

⁸⁸Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda (New York: Columbia UP 2002), 10.

⁸⁹Some analysts contend that alliance formation can lead to blowback, arguing that the US-Saudi alliance led Al Qaeda to target the United States. Christopher Layne, ‘Offshore Balancing Revisited’, The Washington Quarterly 25/2 (Spring 2002), 240. This argument ignores the myriad reasons Al Qaeda is opposed to the United States independent of the US military presence in Saudi Arabia. In any event, after 9/11 and the subsequent US campaign, there is little chance Al Qaeda hostility will end even if the United States pulled completely out of the Persian Gulf, in addition to Saudi Arabia from which it has already left.

⁹⁰Olga Oliker, ‘Tentative Partnership’, 8.

⁹¹James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, American Political Science Review 97/1 (Feb. 2003), 12.

⁹²Kenneth Pollack, Arabs at War (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press 2002), 425–46.

⁹³Don Van Natta Jr and Timothy O'Brien, ‘Saudis Promising Action on Terror’, New York Times, 13 Sept. 2003, A1.

⁹⁴Walt, ‘Why Alliances Endure or Collapse’, 161.

⁹⁵See Shapiro and Suzan, ‘The French Counterterrorism Experience’; Terence Taylor, ‘United Kingdom’, in Yonah Alexander (ed.), Combating Terrorism: Strategies of Ten Countries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press 2002), 196; International Crisis Group, Saudi Arabia Backgrounder: Who are the Islamists? 21 Sept. 2004; Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2002), 205–98.

⁹⁶Pillar, Terrorism and US Foreign Policy, 75–76.

⁹⁷For a list of recommendations on this issue, see Byman, ‘Confronting Passive Sponsors of Terrorism’, 29–33.

⁹⁸Fearon and Laitin, ‘Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States’, 30–36.

⁹⁹See Rice, ‘Transformational Diplomacy’.

¹⁰⁰Walt, ‘Beyond bin Laden’, 72.

¹⁰¹For a review of Russia's brutal and often ineffective approach to the Chechen conflict, see Mark Kramer, ‘The Perils of Counterinsurgency: Russia's War in Chechnya’, International Security 29/3 (Winter 2004/2005), 5–63.

¹⁰²For a review of recent changes, see Andrew Feickert, ‘US Special Operations Forces (SOF): Background and Issues for Congress', Congressional Research Service, 28 Sept. 2004. In addition to expanding SOF's size, in 2003 the Defense Department has made Special Operations Command a ‘supported’ command, one that is capable of independent action and planning.

¹⁰³Ron Hutcheson and Jonathan S. Landay, ‘Bush plan would close military bases overseas’, Detroit Free Press, 17 Aug. 2004, available at <http://www.freep.com/news/nw/troops17e_20040817.htm>.

¹⁰⁴‘Pentagon Expands Middle East Outposts’, Associated Press, 23 Sept. 2004, available at <www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_outposts_092304,00.html>.

¹⁰⁵‘FSB Says CIA Holding Back in the War on Terror,’Moscow Times, 24 April 2002. I would like to thank Nora Bensahel for bringing this point to my attention.

¹⁰⁶Al Qaeda, of course, has probably penetrated some governments. Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, 24. The level of this penetration is nowhere near the masterful level of the Soviet Union.

¹⁰⁷The benefits of unilateral operations may be overstated. Although many critics of the CIA grouse that it lacks individuals who can directly penetrate an organization like Al Qaeda, such an expectation ignores how the skilled terrorist organization itself vets candidates, preserves operational security, and otherwise screens for penetration. Indeed, as Pillar contends, ‘Terrorist operations that are funded on one continent, planned on another continent, and carried out on a third by perpetrators of multiple nationalities (as was true of the attacks of September 11) are unlikely to reveal their entire shape to even the most skilled local collection effort. Living where the water is bad, by itself, is apt to yield more stomach ailments than insights about terrorism – insights that are just as likely to be gleaned in the papers being pushed at Langley.’ Pillar, ‘Intelligence’, 128–29.

¹⁰⁸For a review, see William Rosenau, ‘The Eisenhower Administration, US Foreign Internal Security Assistance, and the Struggle for the Developing World, 1954–1961’, Low Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement 10/3 (Autumn 2001), 1–32.

¹⁰⁹Already US special operations forces are in West Africa, Central Asia, and other unusual locations to train local soldiers against groups linked to Al Qaeda. The State Department also has Antiterrorism Assistance (ATA) Programs to help train foreign law enforcement and security officers with regard to counterterrorism, and since 9/11 this training has focused on many countries in the Arab world, South Asia, and Central Asia, among other key areas. Craig S. Smith, ‘US Training African Forces to Uproot Terrorists’, New York Times, 11 May 2004, A1; US Dept. of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003 (Washington DC 2004), 147–48.

¹¹⁰For an argument on the importance of institutions for securing a true liberal democracy, see Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton 2004). See also Robert J. Barro, ‘Determinants of Democracy’, Journal of Political Economy 107/6 Pt. 2 (Dec. 1999), 158–83.

¹¹¹Art, A Grand Strategy for America, 235. See also Andrew J. Pierre, Coalitions: Building and Maintenance (Washington DC: Georgetown UP 2002).

¹¹²Walt, ‘Why Alliances Endure or Collapse’, 164.