So far the war on terror has divided the world into hawks and doves. Hawks want to crush the enemy with physical might. Doves seek to understand the root causes of terrorism, to address the grievances that motivate the killers: if those can be remedied, terror itself will eventually melt away.
But what if that’s a false choice? What if it’s time for a new division: smart v dumb? The dumb approach says you can either be a hawk or a dove, one or the other. The smart approach says you don’t have to choose. You can, indeed must, be both hawk and dove at the same time – depending on who you are taking on.
When you’re confronting the killers themselves – the men behind last week’s Mombasa bombing, for example – the hawk should show its claws. There can be no havering or hesitation: brutal, ruthless force should be deployed against them, ideally before they strike. As they have shown from New York to Djerba, Bali to Mombasa, al-Qaida are bent on wreaking the maximum possible havoc, the greatest civilian bloodshed. Morally, we should have no qualms about aiming every arrow in our quiver straight at their heart.
But what of those who are not themselves terrorists, but who lend tacit support – those who did not hijack the September 11 planes, but cheered the 19 men who did? There are millions like that, across the Arab and Muslim world but not only there: witness the Latin American opinion polls which showed remarkable ”understanding” of the 9/11 attacks. How should a smart war on terror handle those who are not killers, but cheerers?
Here it is time to release the dove. The bystanders, the Kenyans, Saudis or Pakistanis who turn a blind eye to the al-Qaida operatives in their midst – perhaps making a donation here, granting a safe house there – will not be won over by a western-led military crackdown. On the contrary, they will be repelled by it. They need to see the west take action on the complaints they have. That might mean an end to US support for vile dictatorships across the Arab world, it might mean resuscitation of the Middle East peace process. It could see US troops withdraw from Saudi Arabia, or the world’s richest nations finally wean themselves off fossil fuels and the accompanying desire to control the region that produces them. Of course, such steps will not impress Osama bin Laden and his army of medieval absolutists: they are fanatics who will only be satisfied when every last infidel is dead. But it might appeal to the constituency that currently allows him and his al-Qaida devotees to thrive in their midst.
This surely is the smart formula: a hawk’s face for the killers, a dove’s for the cheerers. In the Blairite cliche: tough on terror, tough on the causes of terror. It seems straightforward enough, yet rarely is that simple logic articulated. The right denounces any attempt even to understand the grievances that sustain terrorism as limp-wristed collusion with terror. The left, meanwhile, often makes the same category mistake, confusing any attack on hardcore terrorists with an assault on the wider constituency that surrounds them – as if a zealous desire to crush al-Qaida is an automatic declaration of war on Islam. Both are wrong.
Still, there’s more to a smart war on terror than the realisation that dove and hawk should be a combination not a choice. The hawks’ war has to be fought by smart means, too.
So far it has been reminiscent most of those legendary first world war deployments of cavalry horses against tanks: a doomed attempt to wage a new war with the aged weapons of the old. Just as those long-ago generals could not adjust to the new rules, so today’s commanders cling to their tanks and warships not realising their uselessness against a hijacker’s knife or a human bomb. War has changed utterly, yet our masters cannot see it.
So Britain has two new aircraft carriers on order for the next decade, while our army brass still learns at staff college about reinvading Europe from the north in a two-corps invasion – as if the world is forever frozen in 1944.
Smart hawks would surely be adapting to the new war. Rather than lavishing cash on expensive, clunky hardware, they would be investing in the only resource that can possibly combat terror: intelligence. Not fancy computers at HQ, but old-fashioned human intelligence – humint in the Orwellian jargon – that would see agents diving into every pool in which al-Qaida swim.
That would entail an enormous cultural shift. Where once our security services scoured Oxbridge for Russian speakers, now they should be crawling all over Bradford, Leicester and Burnley, looking for the young British muslims who might subvert al-Qaida from the inside. For they are surely the future of the war on terror.
Some of this is getting through. The biggest single growth area in the British army today is in ”special forces”; MI5 recently placed a recruitment ad on an Arabic-language website. But here, too, the successful hawk knows how to be a dove, too.
”Intelligence is all about getting people on your side,” says one high-ranking European official. ”That means not doing what the Americans do, knocking on doors at 3am and carting people off to Guantanamo Bay.” Local tip-offs are the lifeblood of humint, and they don’t come if you stomp around in heavy boots. It seems a crucial factor in last week’s Mombasa attack was the offence US agents had caused local Kenyans when they investigated the 1998 embassy bombings.
That’s true at home, too. Intelligence agencies will not be able to recruit from the ethnic minorities unless they, and the state, are seen as legitimate. ”Softer, liberal measures and rhetoric” may be required, says the European official, in order to recruit those would-be agents. In other words, if David Blunkett wants to win the war on terror, he may have to go easy on British Asians’ marital and linguistic traditions.
What’s needed is a surge in creative thinking, even if some of the ideas that come are wild. Personally, I would have sympathy with the military taking over the running of civil aviation: if terrorists are going to aim anti-aircraft missiles at passenger jets, shouldn’t those planes enjoy the same protection as military ones?
There will be tough ethical challenges, too. Old-style, pre-emptive strikes against hostile armies were one thing; but what do we do when the enemy wears no uniform? Won’t an attack look like an illegal assassination of a handful of civilians? What if the enemy is plotting mayhem from another country: are they fair game, as Australia’s PM suggested this week? And are we prepared to have our phones tapped and our emails read, if that will help thwart, say, an anthrax attack on the London underground?
These are sharp ethical questions, but it does not mean there are no answers. Our job is to find them, to adapt past wisdom to what is a new war – in which only the smart will survive.
Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001