The Accidental Guerrilla - Chapter 1 (PDF)

# Chapter 1: The Accidental Guerrilla ## John Quincy Adams, U.S. Secretary of State, Address on the Anniversary of Independence (July 4, 1821) America...goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.... She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the b...

# Chapter 1: The Accidental Guerrilla ## John Quincy Adams, U.S. Secretary of State, Address on the Anniversary of Independence (July 4, 1821) America...goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.... She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. ## In April 2001, five months before 9/11, I was studying at the Australian Defence College In April 2001, five months before 9/11, I was studying at the Australian Defence College, attending a year-long course in strategy and national security policy for military officers and civilian officials. One morning, we received a distinguished American visitor, a retired general who spent much of his two-hour lecture talking about how ground warfare was disappearing. The future threat environment, he said, would involve high-tech air and maritime campaigns, peace operations like Kosovo or Bosnia, humanitarian missions like Somalia, or stabilization missions like Sierra Leone or East Timor. Maritime conflict might arise with China over Taiwan, or with North Korea over its nuclear program, and there was a slight possibility of the occasional brief, lopsided land conflict against a technologically and tactically unequal adversary, like the 1991 Gulf War. But serious ground combat was increasingly unlikely, he said. The second half of the twentieth century had seen the United States achieve unprecedented dominance in conventional warfare through precision air and maritime strike, satellite- and sensor-based intelligence, and high-speed communications: a high-tech, network-based "system of systems." Any rational adversary would see the writing on the wall, eschew warfare as an instrument of policy, and instead choose to compete with the West in ideological or economic terms, since confronting us directly on the field of battle would be suicidal, as any potential enemy would know. Even if, through miscalculation or sheer stupidity, our enemies did fight us, U.S. military prowess was such that their defeat would be swift and decisive. The key challenge for Western militaries was therefore to keep up with the extremely fast pace of technological development being set by the United States, the so-called revolution in military affairs. This would allow allies to contribute ground forces for relatively frequent but low-intensity peacekeeping interventions, while contributing "niche" air and maritime assets to round out U.S. forces in the highly unlikely event of a major conflict. Large-scale, long-term ground combat operations? Not so much. One of my Air Force classmates had the temerity to point out that in fact, many wars were currently going on around the world-95 at the turn of the twenty-first century, according to one count-and almost all of these were land wars. It seemed that, in fact, ground combat was not becoming a thing of the past at all; around the world millions of people were engaged in it. True, technologically advanced democracies did not seem to be directly involved, except in conflict resolution or mitigation roles, but could we count on this always being so? Warfare seemed to be a phenomenon of the developing world, occurring within states or between ethnic or religious groups in parts of Asia and Africa. Nevertheless, didn't the large number of ongoing internal and ethnic conflicts invalidate our distinguished guest's view that war was disappearing? Well, said the general, internal or ethno-religious conflicts weren't really wars, and civil wars didn't count under the classical definition of war either. War, formally declared, as a means for furthering policy objectives, was organized violence between states, in which the outcome was decided through the clash of armed forces on the battlefield, and this type of war was disappearing. The other conflicts we were seeing around the world arose from internal unrest, ethno-sectarian violence, narco-terrorism, or state fragility. Though we might choose to be involved in stabilizing or ending them, these would be interventions of choice, not wars of necessity, and our activities could not really be classed as "warfighting" but would be "military operations other than war." Another classmate asked about the book Chao Xian Zhan (Unrestricted Warfare), published two years earlier by senior colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. She pointed out that this book's key argument was that Western countries, particularly the United States, had created a trap for themselves by their very dominance of conventional warfare. Confronting the United States in direct conventional combat would indeed be folly, but rather than eschewing conflict, other countries or even nonstate actors could defeat the superpower through ignoring Western-defined rules of "conventional" war, instead applying what the authors called the "principle of addition": combining direct combat with electronic, diplomatic, cyber, terrorist, proxy, economic, political, and propaganda tools to overload, deceive, and exhaust the U.S. "system of systems." She emphasized that the authors advocated computer network attack, "lawfare" that exploited legal loopholes, economic warfare, attacking the viability of major corporations and financial institutions, media manipulation and deception, and urban guerrilla warfare. Indeed, in an interview with Zhongguo Qingnian Bao (the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party Youth League), subsequently translated by the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, one of the authors, Colonel Qiao, said that "the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden." 3 Qiao said strong countries would not use "unrestricted warfare" against weak countries because "strong countries make the rules while rising ones break them and exploit loopholes....The United States breaks [UN rules] and makes new ones when these rules don't suit [its purposes), but it has to observe its own rules or the whole world will not trust it." 4 Didn't this perhaps suggest, my colleague asked the general, that land warfare would continue into the new century? Rather than disappearing, might it change its character in response to the Western dominance of one particular high-technology über-blitzkrieg style of fighting that had become conventional orthodoxy but was not the only conceivable approach? Might our very dominance of this style of warfare have created an entirely new, but perhaps equally dangerous class of threats? "Hmmm...no, I wouldn't really worry about that, if I were you," said the general, with a breezy, dismissive wave of the hand. United States dominance of conventional combat and precision strike would be enough to negate such new threats, reducing them to nuisance value only. Listening to these exchanges, thinking back to my experience on operations during the preceding five years in Cyprus, Lebanon, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor--and remembering the Arabs, that night in the hills of West Java in 1996-I remember scratching my head and wondering what I was missing. Whether they admit it or not, most field officers think generals and politicians are wildly out of touch with reality, so I was prepared to cut this particular general some slack just on principle. But still, it felt as if there was more to this little difference of opinion than the normal generation gap. Odd though it now seems, there was nothing particularly unusual before 9/11 about this "end of history" view of warfare. Some people saw as faintly ridiculous the notion that Western democracies would ever again deliberately initiate a war or that, even if one did break out, the West would be anything other than rapidly and sweetly victorious. Some took the same view as the general. Some emphasized the need to preserve technological superiority and a conventional war-fighting "capability edge" for deterrent purposes. Others focused on a crop of new security threats-people smuggling, narcotics trafficking, epidemic disease, natural disaster, climate change, poverty, state failure, terrorism, and civil unrest-many of which were internal and non-state-based, and related to human security (the welfare of individuals and groups in society) rather than national security (which, classically defined, focuses on the survival and political interests of states). 5 At the same time, some thinkers were arguing that hybrid warfare, "a mixture of phenomena" involving a shifting combination of armed and unarmed, military and nonmilitary, state and nonstate, internal and international, and violent and nonviolent means would be the most common form of twenty-first-century conflict. Like the authors of Chao Xian Zhan, these theorists saw the "principle of addition" and the complexity and many-sidedness of modern conflict (what Qiao and Wang called its "omni-directionality") as conceptual keys. In the "viscous medium" of ground combat, with its fear, hatred, chaos, and friction, the difficult but essential task of integrating military and civilian actions into a viable political strategy, under the arc-light scrutiny of the international media, would be critical: tactical virtuosity or operational art alone would count for little. Western countries would seek to master, control, and prevent violence, would uphold international norms (which, of course, they had themselves established in their own interests), and would tend to focus on preventing and ending conflicts started by others, preserving the status quo, rather than initiating wars themselves as an instrument of policy. One of the best-considered expositions of this argument, known as counterwar theory, came from Brigadier-General Loup Francart of the French army, a highly innovative strategist whose 1999 book Maîtriser la violence: Une option stratégique argued that in the twenty-first century, ground forces would mainly be required to intervene in extremely complex conditions of state failure and in humanitarian or peacekeeping environments, where law and order were compromised and state institutional frameworks were lacking. 7 Such forces would have to uphold the law of armed conflict (such as the Geneva Conventions) in the face of adversaries who ignored it, and Western countries would be seeking to control or end violence rather than, as in traditional warfare, to achieve policy ends through violence. This approach could be considered a "counterwar strategy," where the key threat to be mastered would be the conflict environment itself, rather than a particular armed enemy. 8 It turns out, of course, that ground warfare is far from a thing of the past for Western democracies. Eight years after 9/11, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other conflicts going on worldwide, the persistence of warfare on land into the twenty-first century is hardly a matter of dispute. And while human security, hybrid warfare, and counterwar strategy have certainly proven extremely important in today's complex operations, the notion that Western political leaders would never again initiate conflict preemptively or for policy reasons has proven spectacularly ill founded, while ground combat ("conventional"-that is, bound by the set of conventions favored by the current establishment, i.e., the West-or outside it and therefore "unconventional") has proven all too common, intense, and protracted. It would require another entire and rather different book to fully explore these issues, which remain hotly contentious: even analysts who follow them for a living are conceptually divided, and thinkers like Rupert Smith have done a better job in examining these questions than I could. Instead, this chapter merely seeks to provide a context for the true core of this book: the case studies of Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflicts that follow. To do so, it lays out four ways to think about the threat, examines the risk of terrorism and approaches to managing it, and explores the implications for international security. ## The Twenty-first-century Security Environment ### Hybrid Warfare What, then, are the key features of the threat environment? In general terms, we can begin by affirming the empirical validity of the hybrid warfare construct: today's conflicts clearly combine new actors with new technology and new or transfigured ways of war, but the old threats also remain and have to be dealt with at the same time and in the same space, stressing the resources and overloading the systems of western militaries. The "principle of addition" described almost a decade ago by Qiao and Wang clearly applies. New actors include insurgent groups operating across international boundaries like Jema'ah Islamiyah (JI), Lashkar e-Tayyiba (LeT), and the Afghan Taliban; global terrorist networks with unprecedented demographic depth like Hizballah and al Qa'ida; and tribal and regional groups with postmodern capabilities but premodern structures and ideologies like some Iraqi insurgents. The new actors include gangs in Latin America and elsewhere whose levels of lethal capability and social organization are fast approaching those traditionally seen in insurgencies. They also include "micro-actors with massive impact""-like the eight terrorists who killed 191 commuters from 17 countries in the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, spectacularly swaying Spain's general elections three days later and prompting its pull-out from Iraq. There are also armed commercial entities like security contractors and private military companies, and local and communitarian militias of various kinds." In the maritime domain, the resurgence of piracy threats in the South China Sea and off the Horn of Africa suggests the existence of new and extremely well-armed and capable threat groups. New technology includes new communications and media tools, highlethality individual weapons, nanoengineering, robotics, and new kinds of explosives and munitions. New ways of war include Internet-enabled terrorism, transnational guerrilla warfare, and the emergence of an insurgent media marketplace. These have overlapped in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction via networks like that of A. Q. Khan, which was ostensibly nonstate-based (though Khan subsequently claimed that his relationship with the government of Pakistan was in fact very close). 13 And all of this exists alongside robust conventional and nuclear threats from traditional state-based adversaries. States still invade states, as Russia showed in its invasion of Georgia in August 2008, Israel in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006, Ethiopia in Somalia in 2007, and, of course, the West in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. Post-1945 institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the nuclear nonproliferation treaty regime, and the United Nations have proven ill suited to the current environment, leading to widespread calls for reform. Some thinkers have questioned whether the "1945 rules-based order" still applies. 14 The United States, with national security institutions developed mainly under the Truman administration, 15 has struggled to adapt these institutions to post-9/11 threats. As the distinguished Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani has argued, policies like the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic unilateralism, comparative neglect of the Israel-Palestine peace process, extraordinary renditions, detention facilities like Guantanamo Bay, "water-boarding," and domestic surveillance have created the impression that the United States has walked away from the global rule-set that Washington and its key allies created after 1945. As noted earlier, Qiao Liang predicted in 1999 that America "has to observe its own rules or the whole world won't trust it." This perceived breach of trust has indeed proven very harmful to America's reputation and wider interests, as well as to the functioning of the broader international system. In particular, events since 9/11 have exposed the limits of the utility of force as an international security tool, while as the eminent strategist Sir Michael Howard points out, framing the problem as a "war on terror" has tended to militarize key aspects of foreign policy. 16 I will discuss this issue in detail below, but first I will lay out a mental framework for thinking about the environment. ## Four Ways to Think About the Environment As this discussion highlights, today's threat environment is nothing if not complex, ambiguous, dynamic, and multifaceted, making it impossible to describe through a single model. So this section examines the environment via four frameworks which, taken together, give a fuller picture of the threat, its characteristics, and its implications than could one framework alone. The four models are the Globalization Backlash thesis, the Globalized Insurgency model, the Islamic Civil War theory, and the Asymmetric Warfare model. These are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, but together they form a basis for the case studies that follow. ### Model 1: A Backlash Against Globalization The dozens of colonial insurgencies and guerrilla wars of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s-the conflicts Khrushchev called "wars of national liberation" in January 1961-seem in retrospect part of a pattern of "wars of decolonization." Between 1944 and about 1982, almost all the old European empires crumbled, subject peoples gained their independence through armed or unarmed struggle, and the newly independent countries faced forbidding development and security challenges. Though each colonial conflict had some unique characteristics, all followed roughly similar pathways and contributed to a larger metapattern of conflict, fully visible only in retrospect. The threat environment within which the former colonial powers, the new postcolonial states, their internal constituents, and the broader security system operated was colored by this larger pattern, and by the proxy rivalry-global in scope and extremely intense at times-between the Soviet Union and the Western world. The globalization backlash thesis suggests that, likewise, we may look back on today's conflicts as a series of "wars of globalization," in which each conflict differs but all follow similar pathways in response to one key driver, globalization, and in which a backlash against globalization provides the organizing principle for many conflicts. Globalization (a technology-enabled process of improved communications and transportation that enables the freer movement of goods, people, money, technology, ideas, and cultures across and within international borders) has prompted the emergence of a Western-dominated world culture, an interdependent world economy, and a global community of business, political, and intellectual elites. This is the world so insightfully described in economic terms in Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The World Is Flat, as a combination of "levelers" like personal computers, the Internet, open-sourcing, outsourcing, off-shoring, and streamlining of supply chains, along with a mutually reinforcing convergence between them. 18 Even the most avid apostles of globalization hesitate to suggest that its effects have been uniformly positive: indeed, most acknowledge that it has created a class of global haves and have-nots, and simultaneously (through globalized news media) has made the have-nots very aware of what they are missing, of how the other half lives, thus creating tension and anger through perceived "relative deprivation." Even beyond its uneven economic effects, the globalization process has thus also prompted a political and cultural backlash, often violent, against the extension of Western political and cultural influence, the disruptive effects of modernization and global integration, and the failure of markets to self-regulate in a way that protects the interests of people outside "core" countries. Such diverse figures as John Ralston Saul, 19 Paul Collier, Thomas P. M. Barnett," and Usama bin Laden, 22 among others, have commented on this. This globalization backlash has six principal implications for the international security environment. First, traditional societies across the world have experienced the corrosive effects of globalization on deeply held social, cultural, and religious identities-sparking violent antagonism to Western-led modernization and its preeminent symbol: perceived U.S. cultural and economic imperialism. This antagonism takes many forms; at the nation-state level it includes reflexive anti-Americanism, economic and cultural protectionism, and a tendency to "balance" against U.S. policy initiatives or (conversely) to free ride on America's coattails. At the nonstate level, antagonism ranges from politicized but relatively benign cultural phenomena: one example, at the most benign end of the spectrum, is the slow food movement, which originally emerged as the Arcigola organization, a protest against globalized food culture prompted by the opening of a McDonalds franchise in Rome in 1986. 23 More violent examples include antiglobalization attacks by activists like those who sabotaged the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November 2001 or disrupted the Davos forum in 2007. 24 It also involves violent internal conflict between communities divided by their response to globalization (as in parts of Indonesia and Africa); the persecution of minorities associated with globalization processes (such as Filipino immigrant workers in parts of the Middle East); and ultimately full-scale civil war and international terrorism. Second, globalization, by its very openness, affords its opponents unprecedented access to its tools: the Internet, cellphones, and satellite communications, electronic funds transfer, ease of international movement and trade. Globalization has also prompted the proliferation of lowcost, high-lethality individual weapons systems like assault rifles, portable antiaircraft missiles, rocket launchers, mines, and extremely powerful blast munitions such as thermobarics. 25 Consequently, the opponents of globalization-from environmental activists to G8 protestors to AQ operatives-are paradoxically among the most globalized and networked groups on the planet, and the most adept at using globalization's instruments against it. Unlike traditional societies, which embody a xenophobic "antiglobalization" focus, some of these actors serve a vision of "counterglobalization"-a world that is just as globalized as today but (as in the AQ model of a global caliphate, discussed below) is organized along radically different lines. This is an extremely important distinction to which I shall return later, since the first group opposes globalization and seeks to insulate or defend itself from globalization's effects (and thus has a fundamentally defensive focus), whereas the second seeks to hijack and exploit globalization to attack and ultimately control the West (a basically offensive outlook). These groups have different interests, and one of them (the "counterglobalizers" like AQ) tends to exploit and manipulate the other (the "antiglobalizers," of which there are hundreds of local examples worldwide). This pattern was highlighted by Akbar S. Ahmed, whose 2007 book Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization presented a compelling and detailed account of interactions with Islamic scholars and students across the Muslim world during field research in 2006-2007, demonstrating the destabilizing effects of globalized communications and extremist ideology. 26 Third, globalization has connected geographically distant groups who previously could not coordinate their actions (for example, connecting insurgent and terrorist groups in different countries or connecting radicals in remote areas, such as Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas [FATA], with people originally from there who now live in immigrant communities in the West). This unprecedented connectivity means that widely spaced and disparate microactors can aggregate their effects, to achieve outcomes disproportionate to the size and sophistication of their networks. It also means that ungoverned, undergoverned, or poorly controlled areas (such as the FATA, the Sulu and Sulawesi seas between Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, the Sahara desert in North Africa, or the triborder area in Latin America), which used to be significant for local governments but less relevant to regional security, now hold international importance as potential safe havens and points of origin for terrorist and insurgent attacks on many points of vulnerability in the international system. Fourth, the diversity and diffusion of globalized media makes what public relations specialists call "message unity"-a single consistent message across multiple audiences-impossible for democratic governments and open societies. Concepts such as "the international media" are less relevant now than even a decade ago, since they treat media organizations as actors or interest groups to be influenced, whereas in fact under globalized conditions the media space is a domain, an ecosystem, or even a battlespace, filled with dozens of independent, uncoordinated, competing, and conflicting entities rather than a single actor or audience. This is because the modern media space is very different from a traditional broadcast media system (such as a traditional newspaper or television network) in which a few media producers develop, own, and deliver content to many consumers, and yet also different from a web-based system (like early internet forms of "new media" such as blogs and Online journals) where many content producers interact with relatively few consumers. Rather, the new social network-based media (such as content-sharing applications like Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube) allow enormous numbers of people to become both consumers and producers of media content, shifting rapidly and seamlessly between these roles, sharing and producing information, and thus developing multiple sources of information, almost all of them outside the control of governments and media corporations. 27 This carries consequences for Western governments-pursuing unpopular policies in the teeth of negative media coverage is harder, and state-based information agencies such as the State Department's R Bureau (the much-reduced successor to the United States Information Agency, which the Clinton administration abolished in 1999) have less leverage in this atomized and privatized media marketplace. But the atomization of the media also creates a profoundly new and different space in which individuals can communicate and form social/information networks that are innately free, democratic, non-state-based, and founded on personal choice. Even repressive societies like China, Iran, Burma, and parts of the Middle East now have enormous difficulty in suppressing information and preventing communication between their citizens and the wider world. Globalized information systems therefore, on balance, favor freedom but also carry new and sometimes poorly understood risks. Fifth, as noted, the uneven pace and spread of globalization has created haves and have-nots; the so-called gap countries 28 in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and parts of Southeast and Northeast Asia have benefited far less from globalization than core regions of western Europe and North America, while Paul Collier's "bottom billion" has suffered far more than people in those regions. 29 Some gap countries (Burma, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Somalia, or Pakistan) are actually or potentially what successive U.S. administrations have described as "rogue states," or else are safe havens for terrorist activity. But the United States has neither the mandate nor the resources to police or directly administer the world's undergoverned areas, nor would the American people be likely to support such a strategy. Indeed, trying to control and integrate every area of undergoverned or ungoverned space in the world could be seen as an aggressive attempt to bring about further globalization (thus increasing the backlash against it), as a coyly veiled bid for world domination, or as a means of formalizing an American role as a surrogate world government: a role that neither Americans nor others would be likely to accept. Hence a policy of international cooperation and low-profile support for legitimate and effective governance through local authorities, building effective and legitimate local allies, is likely to be a more viable response. The final, obvious implication is that globalization is inherently a phenomenon over which governments have little control. As the financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated, large shifts in the global economy, and the well-being of millions of people, are set by market forces and individual choices exercised through the connectivity that globalization enables. This means that even though globalization has obvious negative security effects, governments have great difficulty in attempting to channel or stop it. Thus the antimodernization backlash within traditional societies, and the existence of networked counterglobalizers like AQ who exploit it, will probably be a long-standing trend regardless of Western policies. This last observation relates to the second model for the environment: global insurgency. ### Model 2: A Globalized Insurgency The global insurgency thesis suggests that the "War on Terrorism" is best understood as an extremely large-scale, transnational globalized insurgency, rather than as a traditional terrorism problem. This model argues that by definition, AQ and the broader takfiri extremist movement it seeks to lead are insurgents (members of "an organized movement that aims at overthrowing the political order within a given territory, using a combination of subversion, terrorism, guerrilla warfare and propaganda"). 30 According to this way of thinking, defining such groups via their use of a certain tactic-terrorism (which they share with every other insurgent movement in history) is less analytically useful than defining them in terms of their strategic approach. Like other insurgents but unlike a classical terrorist organization (which draws its effectiveness from the motivation and cohesion of a small number of people in clandestine cells), AQ draws its potency from the depth of its demographic base (the world's 1.2 billion Sunni Muslims) and its ability to intimidate, co-opt, or mobilize that base for support. And as I shall show, AQ applies the same standard four tactics (provocation, intimidation, protraction, and exhaustion) used by all insurgents in history, though with far greater scope and ambition. This implies that the best-fit conceptual framework to deal with AQ is counter-insurgency rather than conventional warfare or traditional counterterrorism. Like other counterinsurgencies, the civilized world's confrontation with takfiri extremism is therefore population-centric-that is, its key activities relate to protecting the world's Muslim population from AQ intimidation and manipulation, countering extremist propaganda, marginalizing insurgent movements, and meeting the Muslim population's legitimate grievances through a tailored, situation- and location-specific mix of initiatives that are mostly nonmilitary. Killing or capturing terrorists is a strictly secondary activity, because it is ultimately defensive (keeping today's terrorists at bay) rather than decisive (preventing future terrorism). Conversely, programs that address the underlying conditions that terrorists exploit (thus preventing another crop of terrorists from simply replacing those we kill or capture today) are ultimately decisive. Clearly, like any military or law enforcement strategy, countering AQ requires both the kill/capture of current terrorists and programs to counter their ideology and address the underlying conditions they exploit. These efforts are complementary (addressing both the supply and demand sides of the equation) rather than opposite choices. Still, and perhaps counterintuitively for some, activities to kill and capture terrorists seem (and are) offensive at the tactical level but are in fact strategically defensive, because they contain the problem rather than resolving it. This approach would differ very substantially from traditional counterterrorism, which is enemy-centric, focusing on disrupting and eliminating terrorist cells themselves rather than on controlling the broader environment in which they operate. But although it is an insurgency, the takfiri extremist movement differs in key ways from a traditional insurgency because of its scale. Unlike other insurgents, the "given territory" in which AQ seeks to operate is the entire globe, and the "political order" it seeks to overthrow is the political order within the entire Muslim world and the relationship between the world's Muslim population (the ummah) and the rest of world society. This, again, has major implications for international security. First, the unprecedented scale and ambition of this insurgent movement, and the unparalleled connectivity and aggregation effect it has achieved through access to the tools of globalization, renders many traditional counterinsurgency approaches ineffective. For example, traditional "hearts and minds" approaches are directed at winning the support of the population in a territory where insurgents operate. But under conditions of globalized insurgency, the world's entire Muslim population, and the populations of most Western countries, are a target of enemy propaganda and hence a potential focus for information operations. But such a large and diverse target set is, by definition, not susceptible to traditional locally tailored hearts-and-minds activities, and the difficulty in achieving message unity (noted earlier) undercuts such attempts anyway. Likewise, traditional counterinsurgency uses improved governance and legitimacy to build alliances with local communities and marginalize insurgents; in a globalized insurgency, this approach may work at a local level with people in a given insurgent operating area, but may still have little impact on remote sources of insurgent support (such as Internet-based financial support or propaganda support from distant countries). This implies the need for unprecedented international cooperation in managing the terrorism threat. Since 9/11, such cooperation has in fact been excellent (especially in areas such as transportation security and terrorist financing). United States leadership has been central to this effort, but international support for U.S. initiatives has waned substantially since the immediate post-9/11 period, largely as a result of international partners' dissatisfaction with U.S. unilateralism, perceived human rights abuses, and the Iraq War. This implies that America's international reputation, moral authority, diplomatic weight, persuasive ability, cultural attractiveness, and strategic credibility-its "soft power" is not some optional adjunct to military strength. Rather, it is a critical enabler for a permissive operating environment-that is, it substantially reduces the friction and difficulty involved in international leadership against threats like AQ-and it is also the prime political component in countering a globalized insurgency. This in turn implies the need for greater balance between the key elements (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic) of national power. In this context, it is important to clearly understand the role AQ plays. I describe its "military" strategy in the next section, but its organizational strategy is worth examining here. Al Qa'ida acts as "inciter-in-chief," 31 or as Ayman al-Zawahiri describes it, al talia al ummah, the "vanguard of the ummah," a revolutionary party that seeks to build mass consciousness through provocation and spectacular acts of "resistance" to the existing world order. It works through regional affiliates (AQ in Iraq, AQ in the Arabian Peninsula, AQ-Maghreb, Groupe salafiste pour la prédication et le combat, Jema'ah Islamiyah, Abu Sayyaf Group, etc.) to co-opt and aggregate the effects of multiple, diverse local actors in more than 60 countries. It is this ability to aggregate and point all the players in one direction (via propaganda, technical assistance, broad strategic direction, and occasional direct guidance) that gives AQ its strength. This implies that a strategy which I described in 2004 as one of "disaggregation," cutting the links between AQ central leadership and among its local and regional allies and supporters, may be more successful than policies that lump all threats into the single undifferentiated category of "terrorists." Fundamental to counterinsurgency is an ability to undercut the insurgents' appeal by discrediting their propaganda, exposing their motives, and convincing at-risk populations to voluntarily reject insurgent co-option and intimidation. In the context of a globalized insurgency this translates into diplomatic initiatives that undercut AQ credibility on issues like Israel/Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This cannot simply be "spin": it demands genuine attempts to address legitimate grievances. This in turn implies political initiatives to construct credible and legitimate alternatives for the world's Muslim population, instead of the current limited choice between support for AQ or "collaboration" with the West. In this context, the Amman Message initiative of King Abdullah II of Jordan is an extremely important first step, bringing together religious and political leaders from across the Islamic world to condemn AQ's heretical takfiri ideology. 32 Muslim initiatives of this kind exist, though they often receive little attention in the West. Being local and indigenous, they are much more powerful and credible than Western initiatives: the role of counterpropaganda efforts, wherever feasible, should be to support and amplify such Muslim initiatives rather than to generate competing Western messages. This also implies the need for counterpropaganda capabilities (discussed below) to discredit AQ and inoculate at-risk populations-including immigrant populations in the West-against AQ's appeal. The final major implication is that an indirect, highly localized approach-working by, with, or through genuine alliances and local partnerships wherever possible-would probably be much more successful than a policy of direct U.S. intervention. This is because many governments in the world rightly resent U.S. interference in their internal affairs or cannot, because of domestic public opinion, accept direct U.S. counterterrorism assistance, making overtly U.S.-controlled or -funded approaches unacceptable. On the other hand, virtually every government in the world has an interest in protecting itself against domestic terrorism and extremist subversion. This implies that wherever possible, Western countries should seek to build genuine partnerships with local governments and civil society networks, operate behind the scenes, avoid large-scale commitment of U.S. combat forces, support locally devised initiatives, and apply diplomatic suasion (rather than force) to modify local government behavior. There is thus a trade-off between effectiveness and control: local initiatives afford less control but carry greater likelihood of success. In military terms, countering globalized insurgency therefore looks less like traditional single-country counterinsurgency and much more like a very robust aid, information, and foreign assistance program, supported by diplomatic initiatives, stabilization operations, and foreign internal defense (FID), with troops deployed only where absolutely needed. Local governments are likewise fundamental to the third way of thinking about the threat: as a civil war within Islam. ### Model 3: A Civil War within Islam The Islamic civil war thesis suggests that the current turmoil within the Islamic world, along with the spill-over of violence from Muslim countries into the international community via globalized insurgency and terrorism, arises from a civil war within Islam. There are several variants of this model, but all see AQ and its associated takfiri terrorist movements primarily as a response to a series of internal dynamics within the Muslim world: a youth bulge, corrupt and oppressive governments, a dysfunctional relationship between the sexes that limits the human capacity of societies by denying productive roles to half the population, a deficit of democracy and freedom of expression, economies dependent on oil but unable to provide fulfilling employment to an increasingly educated but alienated young male population, and a generalized anomie and sense of being victimized by a vaguely-defined "West." As a group of prominent Arab and Muslim scholars have shown in successive editions of the United Nations Arab Human Development Report, these dynamics have created enormous potential for unrest, and a well of grievances into which movements like AQ can tap. 33 This suggests that although it uses the West as a target of convenience, the real threat from AQ and the broader takfiri movement is to the status quo in Muslim countries, through activities directed initially at overthrowing existing political and religious structures in the Islamic world, and only then turning to remake the relationship between the ummah and the rest of global society. Again perhaps counterintuitively, this theory would imply that AQ terrorist violence is not fundamentally directed at the West, but rather uses attacks on Western countries and exploits their responses in order to further its real objective: gaining ascendancy over the Islamic world. What we are witnessing, this model suggests, is a battle for the soul of Islam, a violent competition for control over one-eighth of the world's population. Both Faisal Devji, in Landscapes of the Jihad, and Akbar Ahmed, in Islam under Siege, advanced variations on this approach. 34 Ayman al-Zawahiri, identified as the principal AQ planner and ideologue, 35 also expressed this thinking in a statement shortly