BALI: The US Central Intelligence Agency's director spent the last few days presenting testimony to Congress in Washington. Its message is sombre: after the latest atrocity in Bali, it is clear various terrorist organisations are regrouping, and are about to launch further attacks, writes Jonathan Eyal
The epic "war against terrorism" must therefore go on. It may be long, arduous and full of setbacks but, at least as far as Washington is concerned, it is the only alternative. And public opinion in some western countries most directly affected by the latest Bali murders, particularly Britain and Australia, appears to share this view. In both countries, support for the US stance has hardened. Yet the reality is that America's war is still being conducted with the wrong instruments. And at least in one key respect - that of winning hearts and minds - it is failing badly.
Much of the criticism heaped regularly upon the US is misconceived. It is not true to suggest that President Bush's administration regards military force as the only instrument against international terrorism. American officials have always accepted that this "war" is different and it must combine a variety of instruments, from the military stick to economic aid and a new diplomacy which seeks to persuade the world's dispossessed the US is not their chief oppressor.
It is usually forgotten that Afghanistan's biggest single aid donor even before the terrorist atrocities of September last year was none other than the US. Since then, Washington has greatly expanded its aid programme and has tried strenuously to differentiate between a minority of Islamic extremists, and a majority of Muslim nations, many of whom remain America's staunch allies.
Nor is it true that the US has been blind to the need to harness international institutions to this effort. This year alone, Washington dropped its long-standing opposition to membership in some of the United Nations's specialised agencies, and US diplomats have worked hard to deprive terrorists of financial support through the elaboration of various international conventions. Every White House official knows that terrorism, as a phenomenon, cannot be completely eradicated. And even the lowest clerk in the US State Department is aware that the immediate battle against the al- Qaeda network must be combined with a greater effort to win hearts and minds and to alleviate poverty and resentment around the world. The problem, therefore, is less with the grand strategy, and more with its execution.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, Americans were correct in rethinking their entire military strategy. In the past, US military posture was based on the existence of organised states and recognisable governments which could be deterred by a display of American military might or, if the worst happened, confronted in conventional wars. This no longer applies today when the fight is very often against shadowy groups of individuals, hiding in the territory of a failed state which is under nobody's control.
The fact that the US remains the world's only superpower, with a vast nuclear arsenal, is clearly irrelevant to bin Laden. Indeed, the more the US is impregnable on the battlefield, the more its enemies will resort to unconventional means of warfare. So, it was right for the US to rethink its military plans, and to proclaim that, in the future, it will hit at terrorist organisations the moment these are identified, and well before they manage to hit at the US.
The mistake the US made, however, was to transform this into a global new military doctrine. If interpreted literally, it amounts to a repudiation of most international norms of behaviour, by proclaiming that Washington retained the freedom to decide when and where to strike. This led to the spurious division of the world between countries which either wholeheartedly support the US or are against it. And the result was predictable: a failure to win new friends, coupled with the loss of support for US policies among some its best friends in Europe.
The Bush administration also suffers from an inability to understand that an equitable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute will not be a by-product of the fight against terrorism, but is an absolute precondition for depriving terrorists of popular support.
No amount of propaganda would persuade any ordinary Muslim from either the Middle or Far East that the US can ever be Islam's friend as long as the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world do not engage in violence. Nevertheless, a strange sense of amnesia or self-denial has gripped many Muslim nations. Millions abhor the loss of innocent lives, but blame the US for the tragedy. And millions more genuinely believe that US intelligence perpetrated the atrocities, as a justification to hit Muslims around the world. For the moment, the war for the hearts and minds of the Islamic world has been lost by the US.
To make matters worse, the US policy in south-east Asia is a disaster waiting to happen. Earlier this year, American troops arrived in the Philippines, in what was touted as the opening of a "second front" against terrorism. Again, the threat assessment may have been correct: al-Qaeda operatives have been identified in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, where other terrorist organisations, such as the Jemaah Islamiah, also operate.
BUT, yet again, the US failed to address the key problems of the region, which are weak and corrupt governments, ailing economies and the marginalisation of millions of Muslims. Indeed, the US has actually compounded the error by getting closer to corrupt local elites. Links with the same Indonesian military which was responsible for massacres in East Timor and Aceh were restored; Malaysia's Prime Minister, who until recently was treated with mild disdain in Washington, is now feted as a key US ally. Washington's tendency to lump together various Islamist groups as part of the same threat has merely legitimised a crackdown on political dissent throughout the region.
It is noticeable that Indonesia's first response to the atrocities in Bali has been to seek the reimposition of emergency powers, abolished when the country's dictatorship collapsed four years ago. The association of the US with bad governance and corrupt local rulers created the anti-American difficulty in the Middle East; the same problem is now being created in the Far East as well.
And finally, there is the question of Iraq. The Bush administration has many reasons for wishing to remove Saddam Hussein. But they are related to broader questions of influence over the Middle East and control over oil resources; they are not directly connected to the war against terrorism. Even the most stalwart US supporters such as the British are visibly embarrassed by Washington's allegations that Saddam Hussein is linked to al-Qaeda. The US eagerness to settle other international scores, from Iraq to North Korea, on the back of its campaign against terrorism has resulted in an unnecessary diversion of resources and has compounded Washington's diplomatic difficulties.
Either way, the threat from terrorism is increasing. And a new and more ominous trend appears to be developing. The key targets at the moment are America's traditional allies, rather than the US itself. The killing of German tourists in Tunisia, the attack against a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen and the murders of mainly Australian citizens in Bali may be part of a wider strategy to divide the countries which support the US. The warning from al-Qaeda recently about further attacks in Europe, and particularly in Germany, also points in the same direction. It is possible not all the acts are centrally co-ordinated. But they all feed on the same sense of frustration and general hatred against the "West".
Has the US, therefore, failed in its efforts? Not yet. But failure is guaranteed unless it accepts that the current confrontation is like a civil war: it is about how the global village is to be administered and on whose behalf.
It is, therefore, about the rule of law, human rights, political and cultural structures and about justice. It is self-defeating to talk of the terrorists as though they were some kind of vermin who should simply be destroyed. They may be incomprehensibly outlandish and inhumane. But it would be as well to acknowledge that they are also intelligent, well-organised and widely dispersed.
To set as an ambition the forcible defeat and elimination of politically motivated terrorism globally is to condemn ourselves to frustration and disappointment. Terrorism can only be diminished if the West in general, and the US in particular, engage in a co-ordinated attack on the economic and political injustices that feed it.
Jonathan Eyal is Director of Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London