National Interest Magazine.
Thinking Outside the Tank
By: Steven Simon & Jonathan Stevenson
The age of sacred terror dawned on September 11, 2001. Yet the United
States still has no satisfactory grand strategy for neutralizing a
stateless, religiously inspired network of militants who seek to bring down
great powers by acts of apocalyptic destruction. Instead, current policy
thinking cleaves towards two extreme positions--one morally and politically
unpalatable and the other risky and destructive.
The first, premised on the belief that it is too late to fine-tune the
policies that have alienated Muslims, involves the abject capitulation of
the United States to the implicit demands of Bin Ladenism. The United States
would abandon Israel, jettison its strategic relationships with Saudi Arabia
and Egypt, and forsake its leverage and standing in the Arab world. The
second envisages a full-scale Western mobilization against transnational
Islamist terrorism--a total war on terror. Under this scenario, the West's
intelligence, law-enforcement and military assets would be brought to bear
against any actual or potential terrorist strongholds or supporters.
Meanwhile, Muslim governments would bandwagon operationally and politically
behind a hegemonic America. The former would amount to negotiating with
terrorists, and indeed yielding them victory. The latter would amount to
furnishing Osama bin Laden, at prohibitively high risk, with precisely the
violent "clash of civilizations" that is integral to his apocalyptic
eschatology.
Both positions are admittedly caricatures of viewpoints that are not
quite so unsubtle. But the larger point is that post-9/11 strategic thinking
has not found a realist middle ground. Nowadays the working premise of
strategy, whether capitulatory or confrontational, is that talking to
Muslims is essentially futile--that they must be either appeased or
dominated. The West is hardly so intellectually barren as to be left to such
crude and unsatisfactory dispensations. The trans-Atlantic pragmatism that
successfully steered grand strategy through the Cold War ought to hold more
nuanced answers--a "third way" through which the United States can both
honor its commitments and strike an accommodation with Islam sufficient to
marginalize Bin Laden and his followers. That is the core challenge of
terrorism.
Yet government agencies have their hands full just keeping terrorists
at bay. In the rush of operations, they are not empowered or practically
able to take a fully balanced strategic view or, in most cases, to look far
into the future. The Bush Administration's Middle East Partnership
Initiative, its repackaging of Helsinki process programs, and the Djerejian
panel's study highlighting the need for more robust public diplomacy in the
Muslim world point tentatively in the right direction. But they also reflect
an approach to defining and tackling terrorism's root causes and attenuating
terrorist motivations that is interstitial rather than systemic. The
integrity of State Department policy planning--which was formidable under
George Kennan and Paul Nitze during the Cold War and later under Dennis Ross
in anticipating early post-Cold War challenges--has proven extremely
difficult to maintain against the relentless day-to-day demands of foreign
relations and crisis management.
These became even more varied and complicated in the 1990s. Moreover,
those who have executed U.S. foreign policy have usually had little time for
internal or external analysts. "Occasionally an outsider may provide
perspective", Henry Kissinger has noted, "[but] almost never does he have
enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves." The Defense
Department has an important policy-planning role in determining the size and
makeup of military forces, as well as their roles and missions, but this
does not extend to subtler inquiries about terrorist threats, motivations
and ideology. The National Security Council is charged primarily with
coordinating rather than formulating policy, and during the Clinton
Administration, its "strategic planning" unit was essentially a
speechwriting office. The CIA's remit is to inform rather than devise
policy. And while the National Intelligence Council forecasts problems
authoritatively, it does not offer remedies.
In light of these gaps in the government's intellectual capabilities,
it might be tempting to invest confidence in the ability of American
institutions of higher learning to meet the intellectual requirements of a
new strategic epoch. After all, the nexus between the federal government and
academia began in earnest in World War II and momentously demonstrated its
efficacy with the Manhattan Project. University professors readily became
veritable intellectual soldiers in a cause behind which there was broad
intellectual consensus. Today, however, the discipline of Middle Eastern
studies--as well as the broader academic sphere of political science--has
become so politicized and polarized as to render the academic establishment
incapable of channeling the efforts of its constituents into a cohesive
intellectual mobilization in the interest of national security.
The Vietnam War as well as the Church Committee's revelations of
intelligence excesses made many academics wary of working on national
security issues for the U.S. government. New intellectual trends spurred by
the 1960s' philosophical ferment, particularly in Paris, reached this side
of the Atlantic. "Post-colonial" studies and gender studies triggered by the
feminist movement crystallized wariness into opposition. Deconstructionists,
in their scorn for purported objectivity and value-free judgments,
contributed to a broadly subversive mindset. An institutionalized academic
refusal to perpetuate Western (particularly American) hegemony, and a
commitment to "using the father's tools to dismantle the father's house"
emerged on campuses. To undermine authority became the aim of scholarship.
None of the social sciences or humanities was immune to this dimension of
the zeitgeist. Notwithstanding compelling reasons for opposing Soviet
communism and expansion, an ideological perspective developed that minimized
Soviet (and other) transgressions and maligned Western civilization.
Those engaged in Middle Eastern studies were disposed to target what
they perceived to be pro-Israel, anti-Arab U.S. foreign policy. To give
substance and amplitude to these criticisms, they interpreted the late
Edward Said's powerful Orientalism thesis as attributing Islam's decline and
humiliation to Western imperial policies and scholarship, and used that
interpretation to justify Muslim victimology and rage. In its current
entrenched maturity, this hostile attitude, in turn, has antagonized an
academic minority inclined to promote U.S. national interests--in
particular, neoconservatives. Now, spurred by the academy's failure to
anticipate the September 11 attacks, tough critics such as Martin Kramer,
Stanley Kurtz, Daniel Pipes and Stephen Schwartz rail like 19th-century
pamphleteers against "apologists" for radical Islam and related political
violence like Joel Beinin and Richard Bulliet. Dismayed by what they regard
as reactionary shortsightedness, they rail back, often denigrating their
adversaries' scholarship. In the acrimonious dialogue now under way, while
both sides have scored debating points, the War on Terror has further
politicized--and therefore poisoned--the discussion. Scholars are now
farther than ever from furnishing creative analytical support to
policymakers.
The sad fact is that American Middle East experts have made precious
few contributions of lasting value to U.S. policymaking over the course of a
generation. A conspicuous exception is William Quandt's important role, as
member of President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council staff, in
formulating the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, but the
very singularity of that example serves to underline academia's broader
futility. Now academic divisiveness has precluded a consensual and
analytically sound assessment of Middle East and Islamic issues. Most
American Middle East scholars would view involvement in formulating any U.S.
strategy for confronting the ideological challenge of militant Islam as
perpetuating a pernicious Western effort to control a justifiably unruly
region. Yet employing their reactionary rivals would risk lending new
credence to the Orientalist thesis. Stronger official oversight of
government-funded academic research would only conjure fears of "thought
police." And selectively enlisting those few academics, among them Fouad
Ajami and Bernard Lewis, who did not downplay the dangers posed by Bin Laden
before 9/11 would lack credibility owing to their association with the
ideological stances of senior members of the Bush Administration.
In short, academia's civil war is not amenable to expeditious
resolution. And the government needs answers for the long war it faces. In
February, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public
affairs, Margaret Tutwiler, who served in the first Bush Administration,
soberly testified before the House and Senate that "it will take us many
years of hard, focused work" to restore America's deteriorating image and
standing in the Muslim world. Islamic and Middle East studies are now too
important to leave to academics.
During the Cold War, the federal government realized it needed help to
cope with the Soviet threat. This prompted a massive intellectual
mobilization that paralleled the immense restructuring of the national
security architecture. Among the most important elements of that
mobilization was the rise of the "think tanks"--that is, independent
research institutions that could contemplate and analyze the ramifications
of nascent government strategies that government officials had their hands
full merely to implement, in many cases devising new strategies wholesale
and determining how to apply them.
Spurred by the recognition that America's intellectuals were
national-security assets, Project RAND began in 1945 as part of the Douglas
Aircraft Company--at the prompting of General "Hap" Arnold and other U.S.
officials--to facilitate teamwork among the military, civilian government
agencies, industry and the academic community through research and
development. In 1948, aided by a $1 million Ford Foundation grant, Project
RAND was transformed into an independent non-profit research
institution--the RAND Corporation. Located in Santa Monica, California, away
from the bustle and diversions of Washington, RAND attracted towering
intellects like Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, Thomas C. Schelling,
Bernard Brodie and William Kaufmann. Their energy, dynamism,
inter-disciplinary sensibility and constructive iconoclasm are the paramount
qualities that think tanks seeking to deal with the problems of
transnational Islamist terrorism should engender.
And new approaches are needed. Better salesmanship of U.S. policies
vis-.-vis the Islamic world will ultimately be unavailing if they are not
firmly grounded in a detailed understanding of the full range of Islamic
thinking and belief systems across different sects, nationalities,
ethnicities, tribes, genders and occupations. Only comprehension at this
deeper level will yield workable means of influencing Muslims to substantial
strategic effect. Charlotte Beers--a former advertising executive and
Tutwiler's predecessor, tasked in late 2001 to promote American values to
Muslims--devised several naively perky advertisements featuring American
Muslims extolling U.S. multicultural tolerance. The ads themselves were a
public-relations disaster and have been ridiculed with some justification by
Muslims and Westerners alike. Lost in the orgy of derision, though, was the
fact Beers was given an impossible job. With no coherent U.S. strategic
policy for striking a better accommodation with Islam, even a more nuanced
and better calibrated campaign would have been unable to outflank Al-Qaeda.
When one such revision was attempted, it portrayed women in hijabs shopping
in a supermarket, thereby validating a particularly conservative yet
scarcely universal Islamic practice.
Post-9/11 U.S. grand strategy is still inchoate. The challenge of
ripening and refining it would best be handled wholesale rather than
piecemeal. Bold new government solutions are now required to fashion
intellectual incubators for the kind of leading-edge analysis--unencumbered
by distracting ideological feuds--that the government nurtured during the
"golden age" of strategy in the 1950s. The objective: a U.S.-led strategic
victory over a globalized Islamist insurgency, animated by a complex and
compelling ideology and fueled by manifold grievances.
Several salient observations can be made at the outset. As think tanks
like RAND became integrated into the U.S. national security establishment
during the Cold War, they became increasingly bound by intellectual and
bureaucratic strictures. The routinization of deterrence and progressive
emphasis on procurement during the Cold War diminished the marginal utility
of the bold creativity that emerged from RAND in the 1950s and 1960s.
Furthermore, early in the Cold War, RAND had no real private-sector
competition because think tanks were new. Competition from military
institutions was also thin: Since experience with nuclear weapons was so
sparse, military strategists enjoyed no comparative advantage over civilian
ones. But as more think tanks sprouted up and were forced to clamor for
government contracts, each institution had to focus more tightly on more
immediate priorities, to tailor output to very specific contract
requirements, and to account precisely for every nickel spent. They became
micromanaged. Because they could retain people only for existing or proposed
contracts--or out of their own revenue--think tanks could develop
intellectual capital and effectively stockpile it only with some difficulty.
RAND analysts like Bruce Hoffman and Brian Jenkins did, to be sure,
perform top-notch analyses of terrorist threats well before 9/11. But
government interest in this work was too sporadic to keep it well funded,
and it was supported out of RAND's own pocket or as a distinctly subsidiary
aspect of Pentagon-funded studies of "low-intensity conflict." Other
American think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the American
Enterprise Institute had also produced estimable research. But many of them
subtly changed character, moving away from non-partisan research towards
something more akin to considered political advocacy--an evolution that
reflected their natural utility as "holding pens" for former officials
awaiting another turn in government after a change in administration.
Nevertheless, plenty of analysts at extant institutions are capable of
the kind of freewheeling thinking that occurred early in the Cold War. It
still falls to their clients--generally the U.S. government--to provide the
wherewithal needed to unleash their minds to hatch a truly grand strategy.
Any argument that hard security priorities make the associated costs
prohibitive is dubious. For example, Congress has authorized substantial
federal funding for "centers of academic excellence" for homeland security.
No doubt these are potentially valuable proving grounds for ideas that will
counter threats to U.S. critical infrastructure. But they are not more
important than formulating new government policies designed to understand
and diminish the very sources of those threats.
What is needed to bridge the epistemological gap between the outside
analytic world and government agencies is a federally funded research and
development center (FFRDC)--whose employees generally have some level of
government clearance and access to classified information as well as
government officials--rather than a wholly independent think tank. This
characteristic would ensure both the applicability of the analysis to the
problems of the analysts' clients and the bureaucratic capacity of the
analysts to explain their ideas to those who implement policy. Ties between
the think tank and the federal government would not be so cozy as to inhibit
"outside the box" thinking. That capacity would be preserved by a
purposefully expansive mandate and the kind of flexible budgeting that
prevailed at RAND in the early days of Air Force Project, but has long since
eroded. The U.S. government need not reinvent the wheel. Since there already
exists an array of competent FFRDCs, the most expeditious solution would be
for the government to change its funding practices so that a certain nucleus
of counter-terrorism researchers in one or more extant FFRDCs were given
that kind of expansive mandate. The alternative would be for the government
to fund an entirely new think tank, dedicated to formulating a
counterterrorism grand strategy.
On the more strictly technological side of government policymaking,
the success of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in
anticipating future military requirements and generating supporting research
proves that a government-sponsored institution, given sufficiently broad
operating parameters, can both think outside the box and serve the practical
needs of its "clients." The vast majority of DARPA's work, of course, is in
the relatively arcane arena of engineering. In contrast, a new think tank
would be charged with refining precisely the sorts of concepts that generate
media interest, public attention and congressional scrutiny. On the rare
occasions when DARPA has ventured into such conspicuous and politically
sensitive territory, its inventive take on policy has not fared well. Two
potent recent examples in the counter-terrorism area are the Total
Information Awareness (TIA) data-mining program and the terrorism "futures
market" designed to collect and sift information about terrorist risks. Both
met with public consternation and were suspended by Congress.
Oversensitivity to public opinion would defeat the purpose of the new
arrangement. But to avoid the difficulties that DARPA has experienced, the
institution in question would need a dedicated external relations department
to vet new ideas and articulate them clearly for public consumption.
Yet a new analytic architecture is not enough. There must also be a
pool of intellectuals and leaders in government service able to act. The
Achesons, the Byrneses, the Dulleses, the Forrestals and their like had come
of age and learned about international relations during the Second World
War. They studied history as well as experiencing it firsthand, and though
largely men of privilege, were imbued with a strong sense of public duty.
Their ready assumption of that duty taught them how to navigate the federal
system--how to win friends and influence people. The seismic geopolitical
changes that occurred in 1939-45, the instant revolution in military affairs
visited by the atom bomb, and the national mobilization already in place as
the war ended made it easier for those "present at the creation" to hit the
ground running. The upshot was a cadre of leaders who put grand strategy
into practice.
Where is the foreign policy intelligentsia now? Like the truth itself,
they may be out there somewhere, but they have not coalesced into an
identifiable group. This shortfall in the nation's intellectual capacity
only compounds the disadvantages posed by the dysfunction of Middle East
studies. Part of the problem is the increasingly ahistorical and provincial
mindset of recent generations of American students. According to a 2003
American Historical Association study, although the number of history majors
in American undergraduate programs began to rise in 1998 after years of
shrinkage, the number of graduate-level history students has continued to
contract. Moreover, the study noted the parochial tendencies of American
history students, pointing out that "history graduate programs at all types
of institutions are prone to ignore large areas of the world in their course
offerings. More than half of the history graduate programs do not offer
graduate-level courses in fields outside of the United States and Europe."
In an epoch proclaimed "the end of history", in which profit-maximizing has
been elevated over public duty, this bias may be understandable. But since
9/11, when Islamic civilization became a central strategic concern, it has
hardly been salutary.
Moreover, the toxic rifts that have arisen in Middle East studies over
Orientalism and U.S. support for Israel have also disinclined students to
take on Middle Eastern history in particular. "Why spend my career being
abused?" they ask, and decide to study, say, China instead. The horror of
9/11 and the gathering recognition of the acute relevance of history to
managing the problem of religious terrorism may move increasing numbers of
young intellectuals to study world history and correct the imbalance. But
even those who were immediately inspired by the crumbling of the Twin Towers
will not be ready for action until they finish school and intellectually
mature, several years down the road. This reality only amplifies the
importance of having institutionalized arrangements in place, overseen by
Congress, that give young scholars a functional alternative to embattled
academia when they are ready.
Their challenge will be very different than that of the 1950s. The
first nuclear age catered to distinctly American intellectual predilections:
an orientation towards the future, an urge to dominate it through superior
energy and focus, and faith in technological progress and the capacity of
the capitalist system to produce it. These strong suits are surely assets in
the campaign against terrorism. But the absence of a cohesive and
hierarchical adversary state and the asymmetric aspect of terrorists'
tactics make them a very different, and on balance more complicated, foe
than the Soviet Union. The Soviets' strategic mindset resembled that of the
Americans insofar as both aimed for international ideological primacy. The
Manichean nature of the conflict for both the United States and the Soviet
Union simulated a zero-sum game, in which there was ultimately room for only
one system.
The leadership of Al-Qaeda may more closely resemble the Soviet
politburo than it might first appear. As a secular religion,
Marxism-Leninism was probably as potent and as absolute as Bin Laden's
militant brand of Wahhabism. But the compulsion of preserving the state
stabilized U.S.-Soviet relations. Thus, during most of the Cold War, both
sides were more or less satisfied with nuclear parity, and mutual deterrence
made nuclear weapons unlikely warfighting tools. By contrast, Al-Qaeda's
leadership appears to view them as prime tools of religious deliverance.
Furthermore, today's threat from a flat network of non-state actors is far
more heterogeneous than the highly centralized, state-controlled Soviet
threat.
Given that academic hostility to the American strategic enterprise
developed even in the presence of the Soviet Union's straightforward enmity,
the more complex character of the Islamist threat suggests that even less
should be expected from the academy now than during the Cold War. This
consideration makes a more fruitful relationship between the government and
think tanks all the more important. But the intellectual makeup of any elite
group of strategists now would be substantively quite different from that of
its Cold War antecedent.
While the rational-choice theory pioneered at RAND in the 1950s--often
criticized as insufficiently historical and empirical--will have a role to
play, historical methods of analysis will be more important in determining
the intellectual warp of a current band of "new stream thinkers." And
despite America's preoccupation with religion, our religious passions
usually stop at the water's edge. Faith-based diplomacy is not America's
thing, and thus far we have been ill prepared to engage in a debate with
others committed to a different faith, especially Islam. Although regional
experts will be important, the new strategists' approach will also have to
avoid artificially chopping up Islam into regions of greater or lesser
concern--for example, the Persian Gulf versus sub-Saharan Africa. This
tendency is generally unsuited to the permeating and global nature of the
current terrorist threat, and in particular has led to the neglect of
potentially significant threats emanating from countries like Nigeria. So
there will be considerable demand for experts on Islam as a whole and for
sociologists of religion. Development economists will have to apply their
knowledge particularly to the Middle East, whose oil-based economies have
hindered balanced development and stalled their broad integration into the
world economic system. Political scientists will be needed to determine how
to transform authoritarian regimes that have alienated Muslim populations
and moved them to look to Bin Laden for leadership into more participatory
systems.
The central issue of deterrence will admit of less elegant solutions
in the age of sacred terror than it did during the Cold War. But if it is a
messy problem, no worthy research cadre will be able to dismiss the
possibility of deterrence even in the face of a seemingly non-deterrable
enemy. In spite of the religiously absolute imperatives laid down by
Al-Qaeda's leadership, the highly dispersed and pragmatic character of the
transnational Islamist terrorist network means that terrorists' religious
and political intensity and tactical mindsets are highly variable. Like more
manageable "old" terrorist groups, the network anchored by Al-Qaeda
encompasses professional terrorists and wavering fellow-travelers as well as
maniacal true-believers. Thus, it would be a mistake to cast all
transnational Islamist terrorists and even most of their more peripheral
supporters as impervious to political and tactical influence.
Indeed, there may be useful distinctions to be made even within the
hardcore category. For some Muslim terrorists, weapons of mass destruction
are indispensable instruments of eschatology. For others, however, they seem
to be merely prime warfighting assets, useful in compensating for the
conventional military disparity between Western militaries and terrorists
with no state apparatus. Terrorists in the first category are liable to use
WMD as soon as they have them. But those in the latter group, though also
willing to sacrifice their lives, would be more inclined to weigh the
political, economic and tactical tradeoffs that crossing that threshold
would entail.
In addition to developing the substance of U.S. strategy, think tanks
during the Cold War made themselves useful as off-the-record venues for
gathering people whose meeting and discussing certain subjects (for
instance, nuclear surprise attack) would have been too politically sensitive
for governments themselves to arrange. Likewise, those institutions
dedicated to addressing transnational Islamist terrorism could serve as
clearinghouses for frank exchanges between Muslim and Western analysts
about, say, pathways towards political reform in the Muslim world. Indeed, a
think tank strategizing for the age of sacred terror would be well-nigh
obliged to venture deeply into intellectual milieus outside the United
States (let alone the Beltway) in which overtly official teams might not
feel terribly comfortable--for example, Paris, where some of the most
probing thinking on Muslim extremism and counter-terrorism is underway.
Fashioning a comprehensive counter-terrorism policy, then, will
require experts on a highly complex Muslim world to identify who falls into
what categories, and operational analysts in the mold of the great nuclear
strategists of yore to formulate non-proliferation and deterrence strategies
for handling different varieties of terrorists. The key structural
attributes of the new elite, however, will be similar to those of the old
ones: its removal from the day-to-day demands of policy implementation and
its exclusive mission, which would be sufficiently broad to accommodate the
kind of originality and experimentation that marked the pioneering efforts
in the 1950s and 1960s and made holistic sense out of disparate analyses.
The great Cold War strategists were all about thinking outside the
box, in a structured yet liberating environment, in order to ameliorate new
strategic problems. Their main accomplishment was the avoidance of nuclear
war over the course of a forty-year confrontation. It was the product of an
evolving vision of American foreign policy that tied short-term actions to
long-term results--that is, tactics to strategy. The methodology and
substance of those strategists' solutions were very different from what is
required now. But the need for policy-level linkage of tactics to strategy
remains, and it is impossible to meet unless the strategy is formulated
first.
The mission of the institutions chosen or created to get the funding
would be to help develop that strategy for the global campaign against
terrorism. It is hard to overstate the importance of doing so. Al-Qaeda and
its followers lack the brute military strength of the Axis powers, but their
potential political appeal is far wider, extending to an entire culture. At
least in terms of the mobilization required of the United States and its
partners, we are indeed at war. To work, any strategy must call on all of
the instruments of American power--hard and especially soft power, the
assets of both the government and the private sector. Any think tank charged
with building that strategy would constitute the leading edge of that
effort, and, most importantly, determine its direction.
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