Waging the inchoate war: Defining, fighting, and second-guessing the ‘Long War’

Abstract

This article answers three questions: What is the nature of the Long War? How is progress (or lack thereof) to be assessed? Where is it likely to go next? An appreciation of Clausewitz shows that practical centers of gravity exist for the Long War, and that the conflict pivots upon the ability to persuasively link ideology to events via a strategic narrative. A close examination of an illustrative case study, the interaction between the US and the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq 2004 – 2006, shows that Al Qaeda has suffered a severe setback, but also that the nature of the war is set to shift yet again. Further tangible progress for the US requires waging the Long War as a global counterinsurgency based on a strategy of ‘selective identification’ (versus pure ‘disaggregation’) as well as an understanding of how to more effectively craft a strategic narrative.

Key words:

• Al Qaeda
• Zarqawi
• Strategic Narrative
• Center of Gravity

Acknowledgements

The work on this article has left me particularly indebted to the following people, who are, of course, blameless for any defects which follow: Andrew J. Bacevich, Richard. K. Betts, Megan P. Douglas, Marc A. Genest, Timothy D. Hoyt, Heidi E. Lane, Bradford A. Lee, Jon R. Lindsay, Helen E. Purkitt, and Jeff H. Norwitz for his support through the US Naval War College Foundation's endowment to the Brown Chair of Counterterrorism.

Notes

¹The views expressed in this article are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Government, the Department of the Navy, or the Naval War College.

²I will use both terms interchangeably since they are analytically useful and in wide circulation.

³For a stark version of the anti-Clausewitz argument and its negative impact on the US military's ability to come to grips with its current war, see Tony Corn, ‘Clausewitz in Wonderland’, Policy Review (Sept. 2006), online edition, available at <www.policyreview.org/000/corn2.html>. For an example of the pro-Clausewitz camp, see David J. Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28/4 (Aug. 2005), 597 – 617.

⁴Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, trans. (Princeton UP 1984), 88.

⁵The next sentence in On War after the passage cited above, ‘This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive’, compounds the false impression that this is only an initial task rather than a repetitive one, Clausewitz, On War, 88 – 9.

⁶See in particular, Clausewitz On War, 485 for ‘greatest effects’, 595 ‘hub’, as well as 617 – 18, 623 for an application to a notional war and a discussion about reducing multiple centers of gravity into one. The examples of Napoleon in 1797 and 1812 are drawn directly from Clausewitz's discussion of ‘Critical Analysis’ on pp.156 – 69.

⁷Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’.

⁸See in particular David J. Kilcullen, ‘Counterinsurgency Redux’, Survival 48/4 (Winter 2006), 111 – 30.

⁹See especially Clausewitz, On War, 78 – 80 on the three ‘modifications in practice’.

¹⁰Lawrence Freedman, The Transformation of Strategic Affairs, Adelphi Paper 379 (London/New York: Routledge for IISS March 2006), 22 – 6, 90 – 1, esp. Freedman builds on and provides a more comprehensive framework for William Casebeer and James Russell, ‘Storytelling and Terrorism: Towards a Comprehensive “Counter-Narrative Strategy”’, Strategic Insights (March 2005) and John Arquila and David Ronfeldt, ‘The Advent of Netwar: Analytic Background’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 22/3 (July – Sept. 1999), 193 – 206.

¹¹Clausewitz, On War, 77, the larger theoretical point holds here even though in a narrow sense Clausewitz is using this dynamic to set up his ideal type of absolute war as opposed to war in reality.

¹²Clausewitz, On War, 89, this idea comes with his introduction of the capstone idea of the ‘paradoxical trinity’. If interaction within a trinity and between contestants can determine the shape war must take, it also makes sense that continued interaction within each side's ‘trinity’ and between them over time could alter the nature of the war as well.

¹³I am indebted to Dr Thomas Mahnken for this pithy but quite useful conception of the terms of victory in the Long War. As for terminology, I find ‘jihadist’ to be more useful than Wahabbi or Salafist since both of these more dogmatic interpretations of Islam still have non-violent strands to them, and ‘jihadist’ captures the fusion of religion and political violence as accurately as ‘crusader’ did for western forces in the Middle Ages.

¹⁴A good case can be made that even the death or capture of Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan at the time would not have ended the GWOT, especially if Zawahiri survived, even if it might have rendered it far more dormant for a period. Subsequent Al Qaeda operations indicate that mid-level operatives and capable cells were already distributed abroad, and the spectacle of 9/11 would spur this lingering core of jihadists into action at some point.

¹⁵The inspiration for Al Qaeda's strategic communications efforts as a war shaping exercise came from Marc Lynch, ‘Al Qaeda's Constructivist Turn’, Praeger Security International (May 2006).

¹⁶As the US government later admitted, its concerted efforts in the immediate post-Taliban period managed to diffuse Al Qaeda attempts (such as an attack on military shipping near Gibraltar) which might have been more inspiring echoes of Al Qaeda's earlier feats, but those that did come off were somewhat muted and did not seem to coalesce into a palpable sense of virile Al Qaeda effort. See the White House fact sheet release after President Bush's speech on the GWOT at the National Endowment for Democracy on 6 Oct. 2005, full text available at: <www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051006-3.html>. The Fact Sheet is available at <www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051006-7.html>.

¹⁷The full text is available at <www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030226-11.html>.

¹⁸NSD-54 is a Presidential-level document describing a national security vision. As such, it gives an excellent picture of the sort of policy-strategy formulation which would animate the US defense bureaucracy. With its formulation of aims and military objectives as well as contextual conditions, it is easy to derive a similar formulation from either of the Bush speeches above. A declassified version of NSD-54 is available at <www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB21/06-01.htm>.

¹⁹The idea of ‘terrorist entrepreneurs’ and their vital role in Al Qaeda's efforts – a role which has probably only increased with the transition to AQAM – is drawn from The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington DC: GPO 2002) esp. 145 – 63.

²⁰The first publicized letter is from Zarqawi to Zawahiri, and is available at <www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/31694.htm>.

²¹For a disciplined look at how the war in Iraq has affected perceptions of the Long War among the jihadist population, see Thomas Hegghammer, ‘Global Jihadism After the Iraq War’, Middle East Journal 60/1 (Winter 2006), 11 – 32.

²²The public version of the NIE's ‘Key Judgments’ is available at <www.dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf>.

²³Lynch, ‘Al Qaeda's Media Strategies’. See Marc Lynch, ‘Al Qaeda's Media Strategies’, The National Interest, No.86 (Spring 2006).

²⁴The Zawahiri – Zarqawi letter is available at <www.dni.gov/press_releases/letter_in_english.pdf>.

²⁵Fallujah as a “Capital” for the resistance represents a fascinating operational variant on the ‘intangible made real’ dynamic, only this time by accident rather than purposeful US action. As for a notion of the losses Zarqawi's network may have suffered, see the talk of 4,000 plus jihadist dead in Hamza Al-Muhajer's (Zarqawi's successor, aka Abu Ayyub al-Masri) call for a week of focused violence in Sept. 2006. See for example the coverage of Al-Masri's taped speech in ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq: 4,000 Foreign Fighters Killed’, AP Newswire 28 Sept. 2006, available at <www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15044435/>.

²⁶This lack of patience may well have been a critical difference between Zarqawi and Zawahiri or Bin Laden. The latter two are frequently credited with a penchant for long range planning and strategic patience based on the careful preparation of the 1998 E. African embassy and 9/11 attacks, to the point that an absence of attacks on the US homeland still does not convince many that an Al Qaeda attack is not imminent.

²⁷See for example, ‘Iraqi woman confesses to role in Jordan blasts:Suspect, interviewed on Jordan TV, admits trying to blow herself up’,Associated Press, 13 Nov. 2005 available at <www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9979747>, or Hassan Fattah, ‘Jordan Arrests Iraqi Woman in Hotel Blasts’, New York Times, 14 Nov. 2005.

²⁸For a sophisticated analysis of the letter's language and a rebuttal of many indications of forgery see Shmuel Bar and Yair Minzili, ‘The Zawahiri Letter and the Strategy of Al Qaeda’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, Vol. 3. (Hudson Institute Jan. 2006).

²⁹For the date of the tape see Lee Keath, ‘Al-Qaida's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged all Muslims to support insurgents fighting in Iraq ‘for the dignity of Islam’ and said the ‘enemy has begun to falter’, according to a video posted Thursday on the Internet.’ AP Newswire, 13 April 2006. See also the discussion of the tape's date in Brian Fishman, ‘After Zarqawi: The Dilemmas and Future of Al Qaeda in Iraq’, Washington Quarterly 29/4 (Autumn 2006), 19 – 32.

³⁰For a detailed look at Zarqawi's falling out with former tribal allies, see D. Hazan, ‘Al-Zarqawi: A Post Mortem. Prior to His Killing, Al-Zarqawi had Lost His Sunni Allies’, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Inquiry and Analysis Series, No. 284 (30 June 2006).

³¹As an indication that this is not all post-hoc reasoning, I made the bulk of the argument in this section in an interdepartmental email prior to Zarqawi's death.

³²For example, contemporary coverage of Operation ‘Tribal Chivalry’ at the time was found in Bassem Mroue, ‘Some Sunnis Targeting al-Qaida in Iraq’, AP Newswire, 9 March 2006.

³³See for example Jamal Halaby, ‘Al-Zarqawi's Jordan Family Renounces Him’, AP Newswire, 20 Nov. 2005.

³⁴For a good survey of the discussions see Arthur Bright, ‘Has Al Qaeda Demoted Zarqawi?’Christian Science Monitor, 5 April 2006. Fishman also provides a good retrospective on the fissures in ‘After Zarqawi’.

³⁵The best coverage of these actions at the time came from Sean Naylor, who could be expected to have good access to US military sources, in ‘Closing in on Zarqawi’, Army Times, 8 May 2006.

³⁶See for example the BBC coverage of the event, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4905406.stm>, for how Zawahiri is praising Zarqawi, but also how the tape originated in Nov. 2005 and the lack of an explanation for the delay in release.

³⁷Fishman asserts the delay was a deliberate move by Zawahiri in ‘After Zarqawi,’ but it could also just be a function of Al Qaeda's difficult circumstances.

³⁸For an example of the criticism see, Fred Kaplan, ‘Candid Camera: The trouble with releasing Zarqawi's outtakes’, Slate, 5 May 2006, available at <www.slate.com/id/2141087/> and C. J. Chivers, ‘Not All See Video Mockery of Zarqawi as Good Strategy’, New York Times, 6 May 2006.

³⁹See Thomas Ricks, ‘Military Plays Up Zarqawi’, Washington Post, 10 April 2006.

⁴⁰Several reports after Zarqawi's death contained background information from Jordanian intelligence claiming that his assault did spur them to a new out-of-area orientation. See for example, Borzou Daragahi and Josh Meyer, ‘Zarqawi Attack Put Jordan Hot on His Trail’, Los Angeles Times, 12 June 2006.

⁴¹Insights on this dynamic of spurring populations to separate and then reluctantly seek ethnic- or religiously-based ‘protection’ can be had by looking closely at the early stages of the war in Bosnia.

⁴²For the full text of Bin Laden's speech, see Al Jazeera's translation posted on 23 April 2006, available at <http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F9694745-060C-419C-8523-2E093B7B807D.htm>.

⁴³Several analysts at the time made mention of the fact that Zawahiri used phrases that were closely associated with Khomeini. The quote is taken from his speech of 27 July 2006, a full translation of which is available at <www.centcom.mil/sites/uscentcom1/What%20Extremists%20Say/What%20Extremists%20Say%20Archive%201.aspx?PageView = Shared>. Zawahiri's Shia overtures are quite explicit in his Dec. 2006 speech where he intones, ‘And I call on every independent, honorable and intelligent one to ask himself a courageous and brave question: were Imam Ali (may Allah honor him) or our chief Hasan or our chief Husayn (Allah was pleased with them) today present in Iraq or Afghanistan, would they have colluded with the Crusaders in the invasion of the lands of Islam, and then cooperate with them and fight the Mujahideen in defense of them?’

⁴⁴For early evidence of Afghanistan as a growing magnet for jihadists which is in direct competition to Iraq, see Anna Badkhen, ‘Foreign Jihadists Seen as Key to Spike in Afghan Attacks’, San Francisco Chronicle, 25 Sept. 2006. Of particular interest, the article mentions an upsurge in Internet communications calling for a jihadist return to Afghanistan beginning in 2005, which indicates their may be a significant lag between AQAM shifts in focus and the ability to flow forces to or from a theater.

⁴⁵For the full text of Zawahiri's speech see <www.ict.org.il/apage/8215.php>.

⁴⁶For a different take on Al-Masri's motivations and more on the internal politics of Al Qaeda in Iraq see Fishman, ‘After Zarqawi’.

⁴⁷See Bush's Jan. 2007 explanation of the current US strategy for Iraq, and in particular the posted ‘backgrounder’ by an unnamed senior administration official, which makes clear that only 1/5 of the additional forces going to Iraq in early 2007 will be directed towards Al Qaeda's core area in Anbar province as well as making clear that Sadr is a key target of the Baghdad operation. Both available at <www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html> and <www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-1.html>.

⁴⁸See for example Edward Wong, ‘An Iraqi Tribal Chief Opposes the Jihadists, and Prays’, New York Times, 3 March 2007; Ernesto Londono and Thomas Ricks, ‘Brazen Pre-Dawn Attack on US Outpost in Iraq Kills 3, Injures 17’, Washington Post, 20 Feb. 2007; and Mark Mazzetti and David Rhode, ‘Al Qaeda Chiefs Are Seen to Regain Power’, New York Times, 19 Feb. 2007.

⁴⁹The ‘bleed until bankrupt’ quote comes from Bin Laden's speech of 2 Nov. 2004.

⁵⁰Bush's speech before the National Endowment for Democracy cited above is perhaps the best government articulation of this strategic vision, but its logic is also evident in Condeleezza Rice's ‘Transformational Diplomacy’ speech, available at <http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/59306.htm>.

⁵¹One of the more enduring images of the 24 April 2006 suicide bomb attack on the Dahab beach resort in the Sinai was a picture of a single bloody bare footprint, which at once conveyed to Western audiences the utterly non-military nature of the targets attacked, and may well have driven home to Egyptian audiences the threat it posed to tourism and therefore their economic welfare.

⁵²Karen De Young, ‘US Sees Growing Threats in Somalia’, Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2006.

⁵³See for example the notable absence of any mention of Somalia, despite the theme of ‘offense’ in the GWOT, in Bush's remarks in what was likely intended to be a major policy speech on the Long War, ‘President Bush Discusses Progress in Afghanistan, Global War on Terror’. As far as a rallying communication of a strategic narrative, the speech would also seem to be under-advertised and ill-configured for wider coverage due to its delivery at 10a.m. on a weekday. Available at <www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/02/20070215-1.html>.

⁵⁴For example it may divert Al Qaeda from following the more patient (and WMD-oriented) strategy proffered by Al-Suri, which is succinctly captured in Brynjar Lia's ‘The al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus'ab al-Suri: A Profile’ (15 March 2006) available at <www.mil.no/multimedia/archive/00076/_The_Al-Qaida_strate_76568a.pdf>.

⁵⁵See for example the profile of Dadullah and his explicit emulation of some of Zarqawi's more polarizing attributes in Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, ‘In the Footsteps of Zarqawi’, Newsweek, 3 July 2006. Badkhen, ‘Foreign Jihadists Key’, provides evidence of potential fracture lines that could be exploited on the ‘Anbar model’ with the discussion of the new Afghan insurgency being split among four groups.