The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (12 page)

Let us not fear what we know to be true. Let us accept what we were founded upon, a Judeo-Christian ideology built on a moral set of rules and laws. Let us not fear, but instead fight those who want to impose Sharia law and their Radical Islamist views.

4

How to Win

What does “winning” mean and how do we accomplish this against Radical Islamists and their allies? It means several things:

• Destroying the jihadi armies, and killing or capturing their leaders;

• Discrediting their ideology, which will be greatly helped by our military victories, but which requires a serious program all its own;

• Creating a new set of twenty-first-century global alliances. This, too, will emerge naturally from the military and political campaign;

• Bringing a direct challenge to the regimes that support our enemies, weakening them at a minimum, bringing them down whenever possible.

It won’t be easy—they’re a formidable enemy—and it certainly won’t be fast. Indeed, it is impossible with our current leaders, who clearly lack the will and the desire to win.

On the other hand, we know how to win this war. We’ve done it before, notably in the Second World War and then the Cold War against the messianic mass movements of the twentieth century, Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. Even in the Middle East since 9/11, we’ve won many battles. In fact, no matter what you’ve been told about the “lost wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve defeated the Radical Islamists every time we’ve fought them seriously. Their current positions of strength were not won against us on the battlefield, but were instead the result of our bad, politically motivated decisions to withdraw before victory was consolidated.

The primary requirement for winning any war is the willingness, determination, and resolve to win and to do the necessary things required for victory. At the moment we have a president who said—incredibly, in my opinion—on November 16, 2015: “What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of ‘American leadership’ or ‘America winning.’”

That says to the American people and to our enemies that America will not lead, does not want to win, and is therefore doomed to lose. Our enemies are certainly determined to lead and to win, whether they are radical Muslims or ambitious secular tyrants.

There is no escape from this war. Our enemies will not permit that. We will either win or lose, and at present we look like losers. Knowing that the current administration will not challenge them, our enemies will press hard to gain every possible advantage before a new president, potentially with the will to win, takes office.

You can see this in Afghanistan. U.S. forces led raids against two huge training facilities in the country’s south in October 2015. One of these camps was approximately thirty square miles in size! General John F. Campbell, who oversaw the war effort in Afghanistan between 2014 and 2015, explained that the camp was run by al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and is “probably the largest training camp–type facility that we have seen in 14 years of war.” Unbelievable! But sadly, this is not surprising to those of us who have been intimately following this enemy and take them deadly seriously.

AQIS is an important component of al Qaeda; it answers to Ayman al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian), bin Laden’s successor. The existence of such an enormous terrorist training facility shows that the terrorists are growing rapidly; it also shows that our intelligence is failing again. AQIS was established in September 2014, and is exporting terrorism throughout the region. The group has claimed attacks in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and al Qaeda is still allied with Pakistan’s many jihadi groups, which frequently carry out operations, especially in the northern part of Pakistan.

Think about that: U.S. officials discovered what is probably the largest al Qaeda training camp since 2001. Al Qaeda hasn’t been neutralized in Afghanistan. In fact, numerous al Qaeda leaders have relocated into that country.

A few weeks after this training camp was discovered, the Taliban struck a devastating blow just outside our major base at Bagram, where a suicide terrorist on a motorcycle blew himself up, killing six American troops in the deadliest attack in eighteen months
(
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/21/worst-attack-in-18-months-shocks-u-s-military.html?via=desktop&source=twitter
).

We were late noticing a huge al Qaeda base, and we were caught by surprise—the worst such attack in a year and a half—by the Taliban. Yet the administration assures us that we’re doing well. Eventually we will elect leaders who tell the truth, who want to win, and are able to lead. When these leaders are elected, how should they proceed?

I offer the following four strategic objectives:

• First, we have to energize every element of national power in a cohesive synchronized manner—similar to the effort during World War II or the Cold War—to effectively resource what will likely be a multigenerational struggle. One leader must be in charge overall and accountable to the president—if this leader does not meet the test, which is to win, then fire him or her and find another who can. We have to stop participating in this never-ending conflict and win! And we
must
accept that there is no cheap way to win this fight. The bottom line is that we have to organize ourselves first before we can expect any international coalition to seriously join forces with us to destroy this evil we must clearly define as Radical Islamism.

• Second, we must engage the violent Islamists wherever they are, drive them from their safe havens, and kill them or capture them. There can be no quarter and no accommodation. Any nation-state that offers safe haven to our enemies must be given one choice—to eliminate them or be prepared for those contributing nations involved in this endeavor to do so. We do need to recognize there are nations who lack the capability to defeat this threat and will likely require help to do so inside their own internationally recognized boundaries. We must be prepared to assist those nations.

• Third, we must decisively confront the state and nonstate supporters and enablers of this violent Islamist ideology and compel them to end their support to our enemies or be prepared to remove their capacity to do so. Many of these are currently considered “partners” of the United States. This must change. If our so-called partners do not act in accordance with internationally accepted norms and behaviors or international law, the United States must be prepared to cut off or severely curtail economic, military, and diplomatic ties. One very precise point on this latter issue. We tend to blame the Saudis and other Arab nations for directly funding the Islamic State and other radical Islamist groups. We must either stop this blame game or we must provide direct and unequivocal evidence to the leaders of these nations and offer them one choice (and one choice only): arrest these individuals and stop this funding or face severe consequences. And we must be prepared to back this up. Blaming others for our own inadequacy does not signal to our enemies, and more important to our friends, our complete and total commitment to winning this war against Radical Islamism.

• Fourth, we must wage ideological war against Radical Islam and its supporters. If we can’t tackle enemy doctrines that call for our domination or extinction, we aren’t going to destroy their jihadis. I’ll start with that one, because it underlies our national willingness to do the others.

We’ve fought radical ideologies in the past and won. Had we lost to the Nazis in World War II, much of the world would be praying at the altar of Adolf Hitler. Omar al-Baghdadi, or whoever leads the Islamic State, and his ilk of radical ideological thugs cannot be allowed to exist in a globalized world that seeks to expand humanity’s potential. They want to destroy it.

Waging Ideological War Against Radical Islam

In the last century, we defeated enemies who combined totalitarian ideology with the power of major nation-states. The Axis powers in the Second World War believed their vision of the world, their peoples, and their political doctrines were superior to ours, and they were confident they would overwhelm us. The Nazis’ doctrine rested on the conviction that the Aryan race was superior to all others, and consequently a “bastardized” society like ours was unable to resist their unity and intrinsic racial superiority. The Fascists believed they had identified a superior ruling class, composed of those who had performed heroically in the trenches of the First World War and then led the march on Rome in 1922. The Japanese believed their leaders, starting with the emperor, had divine support and were destined to rule the Pacific region.

In the Cold War, we defeated the Soviet Empire and its attendant international Communist movement without a major world war. Both the empire and the movement were inspired by the conviction that they had deciphered the laws of history and that those laws, codified in the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism, guaranteed the success of Communism—led by Moscow—everywhere. When Nikita Khrushchev pounded his desk at the United Nations, or, his shoe at the Polish embassy in Moscow, and threatened to “bury” us he wasn’t bragging about the strength of his empire; he was simply and dramatically giving voice (or, in this case, foot) to the core conviction of Communists everywhere.

In each of these wars (World War II and the Cold War), we took it for granted that we had to challenge the enemies’ ideology. How could it be otherwise? The wars unleashed against us were waged in the name of our enemies’ doctrines, just like jihad today, and both our enemies and we saw the wars as what they were: conflicts of and between civilizations. In the Second World War we constantly warned the American people about the dangers of Nazi and Fascist ideology, critical editions of
Mein Kampf
were published, and speeches by Hitler and Mussolini received outraged publicity. Overseas, our Office of Strategic Services (OSS) waged ideological warfare against the enemy, broadcasting to resistance movements and denouncing numerous and brutal regime crimes, mostly against the European Jewish community. In the Cold War, anti-Communism was commonplace, from the academic establishment to the halls of Congress. The Central Intelligence Agency organized groups such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom that contested Soviet practice and dogma in America and around the world.

These were serious initiatives that engaged some of the finest minds in the United States. Above all, the campaign against our enemies flowed from the highest levels of the government, starting with the president. These ideological challenges had important consequences. Indeed, they were among the primary reasons for winning the Second World War and the fall of the Soviet Empire.

When most people talk about “war,” they think of tanks driving across the desert, planes dropping bombs, ships clashing at sea, and soldiers going toe-to-toe against each other. But at least as important, people need to recognize the strategic power of words and pictures. Our enemies certainly do; they recruit followers and inspire terrorists using words via social media on forums such as Facebook and Twitter, sending their messages of hate across the Internet, which they also use to communicate with their legions of followers, including sleepers in our country. Ideas, and the words that express them, are very much a part of war, but we have deliberately deprived ourselves of using them.

United States citizens and, frankly, citizens of other Western nations should demand that these social media giants become more socially responsible. Why can’t Facebook and Twitter start their own positive messaging campaigns about the betterment of humankind? Why can’t they seek to maximize the potential of citizens around the world? These mediums are not simply a place to “express yourself” as I was told by executives of one of these companies. My God, if that is what they are for, the world is in deeper trouble than I think. (And I am not naive for one second to think that ugly, despicable, and unlawful behavior can ever be fully eliminated in the information age.) We
must
develop and use twenty-first-century rules and tools differently and stop applying twentieth-century thinking—why can’t these giants of the Internet apply their own positive messaging? What are their values based on? This shouldn’t require the U.S. government’s involvement. If, however, it does, it will require imagination and intellect that more fully and deeply understands how social media provide a voice to the voiceless—especially women and children. We can do better—the social media giants can do better—but if the U.S. government needs to request their support, then those leaders are missing the point of what they truly have: a means to advance humanity in a positive, more enlightened way.

If you have any doubts about the power of words, just look at the campaigns to silence criticism and suppress the truth in enemy countries (both Iran and the Islamic State have banned satellite television, for example), and the amazing mass of lies aimed at us. The jihadis and the secular tyrants know that they must win the ideological war if they are to prevail. For instance, Iranian leaders constantly warn against the dangers of a “velvet revolution”; they know they were very nearly overthrown in the summer of 2009, when millions of Iranians associated with the “Green Movement” filled the streets with more demonstrators than in 1979, when the shah was overthrown.

I saw this potentially world-changing event from right across the border. At the time this revolution was occurring, I was the senior intelligence officer for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. We were well postured with military forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the people of Iran simply wanted the United States to say we stood with them—they did not want “boots on the ground.”

Instead, the Green Movement’s leaders reached out to the Obama White House. Some U.S. officials pressed Obama publicly and argued at the Oval Office to back up the movement. Obama’s decision was “let’s give it a few days.” It turns out that the president was invested heavily in secret outreach that year to Khamenei through a channel with Oman. That channel influenced the president’s thinking in staying silent. And in 2012 the U.S. set up direct contact with Iran in Oman.