Shifting Paradigms in Counterterror

by Phil Leggiere

Leading analyst sees Obama’s challenge as redefining “war on terror” as counterinsurgency.

“Paradigm shifts,” according to the famous formulation of historian Thomas Kuhn, occur when the reigning models which have guided a discipline no longer adequately account for new developments and data.

In an important essay titled Terrorism's Twelve Step Program, published in the scholarly journal The National Interest on the eve of the Obama inauguration, noted counterterror analyst Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and author of Inside Terrorism argues that many of the paradigms which have guided counterterror policy thinking since 9-11, and which the new administration will inherit, have become increasingly obsolete.

“The current threat environment posed by terrorism and insurgency makes a new strategy, approach and new organizational and institutional behaviors necessary,” Hoffman writes. “The nontraditional challenges to US national security and foreign-policy imperatives posed by elusive and deadly irregular adversaries emphasize the need to anchor changes that will more effectively close the gap between detecting irregular adversarial activity and rapidly defeating it.”

The first major conceptual change urged by Hoffman is to redine the global conflict against terrorism in terms of a global counterinsurgency (GCOIN) rather than a war.

“Although relevant to the challenge that the United States faced in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the term global war on terrorism (GWOT),” he says, “ has increasingly alienated our friends and discouraged our allies. This is particularly so in the Muslim world where the GWOT has unfortunately, and however erroneously, nonetheless become synonymous with a war on Islam.

A new model of counterinsurgency against terror, in Hoffman’s blueprint, would knit together as equally critical components political, economic, diplomatic, information and developmental sides inherent to the successful prosecution of counterinsurgency alongside the existing dominant military side of the equation.

Reframed as a counterinsurgency, efforts most also be radically refocused geographically, according to Hoffman.

“If 9/11 has taught us anything,” says Hoffman, “ it is that Al Qaeda is most dangerous when it has a sanctuary or safe haven from which to operate—as it now indisputably does.” “Indeed,” he goes on, “ virtually every major terrorist attack or plot of the past four years has emanated from Al Qaeda’s reconstituted sanctuary in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) or Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).

Stressing the urgent and immediate need for a coherent “Obama doctrine” in Central Asia, Hoffman says, “the United States has no effective political or military strategy for either Afghanistan or Pakistan and appears to treat them separately and not synergistically. Given that the security challenges in both countries are now ineluctably symbiotic, any serious effort to stabilize and secure Afghanistan must begin with a clear and consistent policy designed to achieve the same in Pakistan.”

Accordingly, he adds, “ the highest priority for the Obama administration must be to refocus our—and our allies’—attention on Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Al Qaeda began to collapse after 2001, but has now regrouped. This will entail understanding that Al Qaeda and its local militant jihadist allies cannot be defeated by military means alone.”

Adequately addressing new counterinsurgency challenges the Obama administration will face, Hoffman argues, entails yet another paradigmatic change in strategy.

“Success,” he writes, “ will require a dual strategy of systematically destroying and weakening enemy capabilities—that is, continuing to kill and capture Al Qaeda commanders and operatives—along with breaking the cycle of terrorist recruitment among radicalized "bunches of guys" as well as more effectively countering Al Qaeda’s effective information operations.”

“ The United States,” he adds, “ thus requires a strategy that harnesses the overwhelming kinetic force of the American military as part of a comprehensive vision to transform other, non-kinetic instruments of national power in order to deal more effectively with irregular and unconventional threats.”

To hope to accomplish this goal, Hoffman insists, “organizations will therefore have to do—or be compelled to do—what they have been reluctant to do in the past: reaching across bureaucratic territorial divides and sharing resources in order to defeat terrorists, insurgencies and other emerging threats.”

Clarifying these expectations and processes, according to Hoffman, is a critical step in efficiently addressing contemporary threats to US security as is creating incentives to more effectively blend diplomacy, justice, development, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and military capabilities and coherently generating and applying resources to defeat terrorist and insurgent threats.

This will require, according to Hoffman, effective targeting of essential support and logistics networks, focusing on the middlemen that help terrorist organizations access funds and purchase supplies on the black market: financiers and smugglers.

“ Attention has mostly been focused on front organizations and individuals that provide money to terrorist organizations,” he says, “experience has shown that it would be more advantageous to expand this approach and target specifically the middlemen that, for instance, purchase diamonds from terrorists on the black market, or individuals that sell weapons to terrorist organizations.”

“What remains missing seven-and-a-half years into this struggle,” he adds, “ is a thorough, systematic and empirical understanding of our enemy: encompassing motivation as well as mindset; decision-making processes as well as command and control relationships; and ideological appeal as well as organizational dynamics.”

Such an understanding, he concludes, is essential to transcending the “one size fits all” mindset has predominated in our approach to countering what is in fact a diverse, and often idiosyncratic, array of enemies.

“Without fully knowing our enemy,” he says, “ we cannot successfully penetrate their cells; we cannot knowledgeably sow discord and dissension in their ranks and thus weaken them from within; nor can we think like them in anticipation of how they may act in a variety of situations, aided by different resources. Further, we cannot fulfill the most basic requirements of either an effective counterterrorist strategy—preempting and preventing terrorist operations and deterring their attacks—or of an effective counterinsurgency strategy, gaining the support of the population and through the dismantling of the insurgent infrastructure.”