Departed US Central Intelligence Agency director
George Tenet tried to ascertain whether available
intelligence justified a war, I observed last week. The
late president Ronald Reagan's CIA chief, Bill Casey,
knew that if you want intelligence, first you start a
war.
If you ask the wrong question, you will get
the wrong answer. Reagan's people had the courage to ask
the right question to begin with, namely whether the
Soviet system could keep pace with America's drive for
strategic superiority. The diplomatic and academic
establishment asked the wrong question, that is, how
detente might be perpetuated with a seemingly eternal
Russian empire. Was communism merely a somewhat
obstreperous partner, or an enemy to be defeated?
Every US intelligence assessment of Soviet
military strength and morale available in 1981 was dead
wrong. Washington learned better by putting Moscow under
stress. How adaptable was Russian weapons technology?
Start a high-tech arms race with the Strategic Defense
Initiative and find out. How good were Russian avionics?
Help the Israeli air force engage Syria's MiGs in the
Bekaa Valley in 1982, and the destruction with impunity
of Russian-built fighters and surface-to-air missile
sites would provide a data point. How solid was Russian
fighting morale? Instigate irregular warfare against the
Russian army in Afghanistan and learn.
The
United States lacks the aptitude and inclination to
penetrate the mind of adversary cultures (Why America is
losing the intelligence war, November 11,
2003). In the so-called war on terror, it lacks the
floating population of irredentist emigres who provided
a window into Russian-occupied Eastern Europe back
during the Cold War. But the best sort of intelligence
stems not from scholarship but from decisiveness of
command and clarity of mission. "War is not an
intellectual activity but a brutally physical one,"
observes Sir John Keegan in Intelligence and War,
published last year. President George W Bush might do
well to read it carefully before choosing the next CIA
director.
It was not the intellectuals but the
bullyboys of the Reagan administration who shook loose
the relevant intelligence. In 1981 the CIA enjoyed a
surfeit of Russian speakers, in contrast to today's
paucity of Arabic translators. But William Casey
routinely ignored the legions of Russian-studies PhDs,
reaching out instead to irregulars who could give him
the insights he required.
Intelligence in
warfare presents a different sort of intellectual
challenge than academics are trained to address.
President Reagan, no intellectual in the conventional
sense, nonetheless formed a clear assessment of what the
enemy was, what it wanted, and how it might be defeated.
Without the courage to define and then engage the enemy,
intelligence services will wander randomly in the dark.
If in 1981 the enemy was the "evil empire" of
Soviet communism, who is the enemy of the West today? A
number of Washington's critics, for example Dr Daniel
Pipes, observe that it is senseless to speak of a "war
on terrorism", for terrorism is a tactic, a mere method
to achieve a strategic goal. But what is the goal and
who wishes to achieve it? Without defining the enemy,
how can one define the mission?
Pipes and others
propose instead to declare war upon "radical Islam", a
formulation that leads to just as much confusion. No
one, least of all the vast majority of the world's
Muslims, can say with any clarity what distinguishes
radical Islam from "moderate Islam".
Western
polemicists felt at home on the moral high ground
against communism, along with president Reagan. But they
are tongue-tied before radical Islam, fearing to offend
a religion with more than a billion adherents.
Inadvertently they give credibility to the radicals. It
is difficult to assess what proportion of today's
Muslims are "radicals", because neither the world's
Muslims nor the West has a clear definition of what is
radical and what is not. Vitriolic sermonizing is so
commonplace under the eyes of "moderate" regimes, for
example Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, that the label of
"radical Islam" has worn thin.
In reality, the
West sooner or later will have to draw a bright line
between "radicals" and "moderates". Under the
circumstances there can be nothing in between. Islam's
encounter with the West leaves room for nothing but
radical jihadists on the one hand, or radical reformers.
Islam is expansionist by construction and political by
its original design. It is a fact of history that jihad,
by which I mean specifically the propagation of the
faith by violence, is a mainstream tradition. Even
communal prayer in Islam has at its center the alignment
of the individual believer to jihad (Does Islam have a
prayer?, May 18).
Identifying the
enemy in 1981 was far easier than in 2004, and President
Bush deserves a modicum of sympathy in the inevitable
comparison to Ronald Reagan. By 1981 no communists still
lived within the confines of the Soviet Empire, only
careerists. The emperor had no clothes, such that when
Reagan spoke of an evil empire and a warped idea
destined for the ash can of history, the truth of his
remarks resonated among the Soviet elite. By contrast
the Islamic world is full of Muslims. It was much easier
for Russians to separate national aspirations and
Marxism than it is for Arabs to separate ethnic loyalty
and Islam. That is less so for South Asians.
The
problem actually is quite simple. To advocate jihad
today is the hallmark of the radical Islamist, and it is
there that the West must draw a line in the sand. But to
repudiate jihad in turn implies radical revision of the
religion's mainstream, and that is the hallmark of the
radical reformer.
Like other religions, Islam
has reached a point in world history - or rather world
history has caught up with Islam - such that it must
undergo a fundamental change. By way of comparison, the
Catholic Church accepts separation of church and state
as well as religious tolerance, but it did so only after
the likes of Count Camillo Benso Cavour in Italy
stripped the papacy of temporal rule over anything but
the square mile of the Vatican City.
Western
leaders must not attack Islam; to take sides against any
religion runs counter to the traditions of religious
tolerance upon which the United States was founded. But
they must denounce the use of force to propagate
religion, and make it clear that they will match force
with force. The enemy is not "terrorism", but any form
of violence, including conventional warfare, in the
service of religious expansionism.
What does
that mean in practice? First of all it changes the
subject and shifts the battleground. The issue is not
whether Middle Eastern governments will adopt democratic
reforms - that is not within the power of the West to
dictate - but whether Muslims will employ violence in
the service of territorial irredentism in the Kashmir or
Palestine. There simply is no more room for the jihadist
dogma that Muslims may not abandon a square meter of the
Dar al-Islam. Violence to reclaim lost territory is a
characteristic of radical Islam and the hallmark of an
enemy of the West. The first step should be to remove
Yasser Arafat to exile in some inaccessible locale.
Further steps should be action - not protests -
to protect Nigerians, Indonesians, or Sudanese against
violent attempts to further the Islamic cause. Black
Sudanese are the victims of genocide encouraged by the
radical Islamic regime in Khartoum. Washington should
send them not only food, but also weapons and Special
Forces advisers. Stern warnings, backed if necessary by
a reduction in foreign aid, should be delivered to US
clients in the Middle East that jihadist rhetoric on the
part of government newspapers and government-sponsored
clerics simply will not be tolerated.
Enemy
is radical Islam In short, the West must give the
Islamic world a clear choice as to who is with it, and
who is against it - words that President Bush has used
but with muddled meaning. That would change the
character of the intelligence war utterly. It may be
harder to define who is friend and foe today than it was
in 1981, but by the same token, it will be far easier to
tell friend from foe once the West carves its criteria
in stone.
The bane of US intelligence in the
Middle East from Somalia to Iraq has been its inability
to know whom it can trust. Victory has many fathers,
while defeat is an orphan, although sometimes attended
by paternity suits. The unseemly public exchange of
charges between the CIA and the Pentagon over Iraqi
politician Ahmad Chalabi is the most flagrant example.
The CIA has placed stories in the press claming that
Chalabi is an Iranian provocateur, heatedly denied by
Chalabi's friends in the Pentagon civilian
establishment. This removes all doubt that America's
intelligence effort is an orphan. The only question is,
whose?
It would be convenient if US universities
trained prospective spies in Middle Eastern and South
Asian language skills and culture. But the United States
can obtain all the spies it wants with all required
skills: it simply has to persuade Muslims to join its
cause. Once the US determined to win the Cold War,
enough Russians and Eastern Europeans switched sides to
give the US the winning hand. Existential despair is the
result of the West's tragic encounter with the Islamic
world, but it can cut two ways; it has produced suicide
bombers, but it also can produce radical reformers who
repudiate their own culture in favor of the West.
If Washington were to make repudiation of jihad
a condition for friendship with the United States, the
demand would have unpredictable and destabilizing
consequences for the Islamic world. Just as the race of
Sovietologists viewed Reagan's determination to
destabilize the Soviet Empire with horror, the whole
profession of Mideast studies would rear up in horror
against such a stance. But wars are won by ignoring the
fat and complacent commanders of garrison troops, and
forcing the burden of uncertainty on to the other side
(Ronald Reagan's
creative destruction, June 8). Decisive
intelligence stems from destabilization of the opposing
side, through defections and similar events.
Bush might as well shut down the CIA and
re-create something like the wartime Office of Strategic
Services, for which Casey parachuted agents into
occupied Europe. Most of the CIA amounts to a make-work
project for second-rate academics, drawn from an
academic environment generally hostile to US strategic
interests. Even if US universities still produced
strategic thinkers rather than multicultural mush-heads,
and even if the CIA could recruit them, little would
change. In spite of the academics, Bill Casey won his
intelligence war because the US convinced enough players
on the other side that it would win. To win to its side
the best men and women of the Islamic world, the United
States must make clear what it wants from them.
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How America can win
