Five Years After 9/11: What Have We Learned?

So says the banner headline in yesterday's Quad City Times. Indeed. Good questions to ask ourselves on this solemn day. Introspection is good for the spirit. Well then, what have we learned? Let's start with the basics, things on which most rational people will agree with. One: Osama Bin Laden masterminded and planned the 9/11 attacks. Two: People are terribly ingenious; there is not a whole heck of a lot one can do to stop a determined and competent person from giving his or her life to take the lives of one or more people if that's what he or she is truly bent on doing. Three: Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Four: The world has changed not necessarily because of what happened five years ago today but because of what has happened since. Five: When you're in a hole, stop digging.

Bin Laden and Hussein: Osama did it, Saddam didn't. We had Bin Laden and most of his senior leadership quite literally in our gun sights in December, 2001 at Tora Bora. And in case you missed it -- and there is no reason why you shouldn't have because it was completely ignored by the media -- Pakistan has declared a cease fire against pro-Taliban militias in Northwest Pakistan. So, we are essentially back to a situation that mirrors the status quo ante minus an actual Taliban "government" in Afghanistan. In case anyone wonders why thing in Afghanistan are starting to look so dire, that's one of your top reasons. That and the record poppy crop injecting cash into the warlords' pockets.

Two: Five years ago, once the initial shock and horror had worn off a bit, the reaction to the 9/11 attacks among many people around the world -- especially in Europe and Israel where dealing with terrorism had been an ongoing struggle for decades -- was, "welcome to our world." We learned with a dismal certainly what most real security experts have known for years: that a smart, committed bad guy can get through any defense. Smart defenses will weed out the stupid and/or crazy ones. Good police work and ubiquitous surveillance will snag the ones with less than perfect security. But the really smart ones, the ones with a good plan are going to get through.

Even if the possible Almighty were to reach out and touch the souls of every misguided madrassa mullah and every angry, disenchanted, and twisted Muslim youth tomorrow there would still be a world full of very, very angry people with grievances both real (and there are real ones) and imagined who would be willing to exchange their lives for the lives of x Americans, where x equals as many as they can get away with. I'll refer you back down a few paragraphs to the passage about the global marketplace and the resources available to the smart and dedicated mass murderer/guerilla. We all live on United 93 now bitches. Deal with it.

Does that seem cold and cynical? Too bad. This is the world we have made. It is the world we will have to live in forever, or as near as matters for anyone alive today. War on Terror? What a joke! Wars end. Wars have two or more state combatants, one of whom can surrender and submit and stop the violence. What are the victory conditions of the War on Terror? Whose surrender do we take? Whose country do we occupy and transform into a vibrant, democratic, market-based nation with a New Marshall Plan? What guarantees do we have that hostilities will not begin again?

Most importantly: In who's interest is it to maintain in the public mind the metaphor (if not the actuality) of Long War that has such fuzzy outlines? See end of post.

Three, Iraq: Today at least I want to try to stay away from the usual thrashing of the Administration. So let us not dwell on the affair other than to look at the lesson's learned in a strategic sense. Collapsing a state is easy. Putting one back together isn't. A bit like putting the toothpaste back in the tube isn't it? Three years on, 150,000 plus boots on the ground, 2,600 plus dead and close to 20,000 wounded, practically every unit in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps inventory having rotated through at one time or another and what have we got to show for it? A couple of elections that split the country along sectarian/cultural lines and a coalition government that might last say, half an hour if we and the Brits were to disappear overnight. Kind of feels makes you wonder what the point is of having this almighty military doesn't it? I mean if we are really serious with ourselves we can probably count on two hands the number of countries that the U.S. military couldn't roll up in a matter of a month if that was what we chose to do.

But then what? There you are, a collapsed state, a pissed off population with access to three thousand years of history, computers and the Internet. You've got a global marketplace awash in the makings of all kinds of nasty things: shaped, remotely detonated explosives; unmanned aerial vehicles, night vision goggles, chemical weapons, dirty nuclear bombs, all available for smart people to build from off-the-shelf parts and for really rich people to buy ready-made from arms dealers (well, except for the dirty bombs). At the end of the day there you are, 150,000 American troops with their figurative dicks in the meat grinder and if the folks in the country don't want you there badly enough there isn't jack we can do about it.

Four: There were two paths to be taken after 9/11. The path not taken would have leveraged the sympathy of a shocked world to work to solve the root causes of terrorism: tyranny, poverty, ignorance and helplessness. It would have looked hard at our globalized economy of goods and ideas and perhaps have come to grips with the fact that there are losers in this new world order and that their grievances are genuine and well-founded. What starry=eyed fools we were. In the end we all knew that we would lash out like a macho man-child. Five years later and literally all the good will in the world has been pissed away like a six-pack of PBR

Mostly, we have investigated and measured the limits of military power in the world of the 21st Century. As we have learned in Iraq, as the Sabras learned in Lebanon, and as NATO forces are now learning in Afghanistan, war is no longer what we thought it was and is increasingly unable to achieve its traditional aims. As John Robb explains in clear bullet points:

The western way of war in the 21st century is a pale shadow of the warfare it waged in the 20th. The reason is simple: for western societies war is no longer existential. Instead, it's increasingly about smoothing market flows and tertiary moral concerns/threats. As a result of this diminishment of motivation, western warfare is now afflicted with the following:

• Operations of low lethality. Western militaries do not have the desire, nor the sanction, to conduct the high casualty operations typically associated with real wars. Technology has been leveraged to increase the precision of attacks to limit collateral damage and save the lives of civilians. The corollary to this is that western militaries are also fiercely protective of the lives of their soldiers. Warfare, increasingly, is supposed to be costless. What this means is that we will not see Sherman's 'March to the Sea' or Hama in the near future - and - the loss of a hundred soldiers in southern Lebanon will be enough to stop the Israeli army.


• Marginal placement within national priorities. Militaries are increasingly professional (with a trend towards the use of mercenaries) and conscription has become impossible. This drastically limits the number of soldiers that can be applied to any conflict. In addition, to retain competitive positioning on the global stage, states and their economies are operated as if war is not going on. To wit: military budgets are considered just another line item on a more complex national budget. Gone are the days of massive mobilization and economic restructuring for war.


• Muddled objectives. Given the lack of the cohesive and singular reason for war -- the survival of the state and its people through the elimination of its enemies -- the reasons for warfare will drift. This translates into a constantly shifting landscape of military objectives, where current objectives recede in favor of replacements before they can be reached. The result is confusion, mission creep, and conflict escalation.

Playing with War
The upshot of this diminishment of warfare is that wars will become increasingly difficult to win. The reasons are straightforward:

• Asymmetric motivation. In almost all instances, the opposition will approach the conflict as an existential war. This motivation both allows them to fight harder and longer than those western forces sent against it. The only aspects of warfare left in the west's favor are training and technology.


• New methods of warfare will emerge to level (flatten) the playing field. Since warfare is a conflict between minds, its natural to expect that as the rest of the world gains capacity through globalization, the delta in training and technology will diminish. We have already seen this in the emergence of open source warfare (Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and more) and 4GW light infantry (Hezbollah).


• Proliferation of opposition. As we have often seen, as western militaries apply violence, they often destroy the structures that hold together societies. This results in the proliferation of groups that adopt violence. Much, if not all, of that violence will eventually be directed at the western militaries themselves.

Learning to Live with Limits
Ultimately, western societies will need to learn to live within the limits of this new framework. It is not possible for us to reverse the clock on this trend. Any mass mobilization for war that lifts existing limitations will be severely punished by both global markets and opinion (both domestically and abroad) if it ever was attempted. Given the inevitability of the limited nature of western warfare from now and into the future, we should avoid the following traps:

• Nation-building as a global social policy. Historically, counter-insurgency against an established enemy has almost never worked (and when it has, it usually involves bloody exterminations). Any attempt to build a nation will likely, particularly in the current environment of globalization, yield an opponent that will be impossible to defeat through limited means. Further, the durations of these conflicts will exceed the capacity of the western states to maintain a cohesive set of objectives -- they will shift with opinion polls and political winds.


• Collapsing rogue states. In almost all instances, despite how easy it is to collapse a weak state with modern weapons, those wars launched to collapse rogue states will not yield positive results. The collapse will necessitate calls for revival (see item one). Unless states are willing to live with partial collapse without resolution, they should not undertake the action in the first place.


• Escalation of tension. Given an inability to resolve conflicts through nation-building and state collapse, western states should endeavor to deescalate conflicts rather than ignite them. Escalation is a false God that promises a return of the motivational clarity found in the wars of the 20th Century. It cannot deliver this.

Five: God, what depressing litany. Had enough? Good. So, let's get down to learnin' some serious lessons.

• In order to secure true, long-term security America must actually walk the talk of standing for liberty, justice and human rights. As it says in Luke: To whom much is given much is expected.


• Perhaps it is time to reconsider the terms of the globalized market economy. What if we worked to add some "friction" to globalization in the way of better working conditions, labor laws, environmental controls? Wouldn't the relative increase in cost of business for the current low-cost producers who don't have to contend with such troublesome issues (which, incidentally are also often the most troublesome nations) improve the situation for the very productive workforce in the United States. It is possible to do well by doing good.


• If wars of conquest and occupation are pretty much futile in the context of 4th Generation War, then what is the point of having a superpower-class military? Our nuclear arsenal provides protection against aggression or threat to vital national interests. Perhaps it is finally time to consider a leaner, meaner military more suited to unconventional warfare and peacekeeping than the conventional mass maneuver wars of the 20th Century. What new mechanisms can we find for collective security that leverage our current military investment and decrease our exposure to go-it-alone debacles? What could we do with the resulting savings in the defense budget?


• Terrorists will always be with us. Destroy a couple of buildings... Heck, nuke a whole city. Unthinkable atrocities that might shatter the soul. But at the end of the day, what have they taken from us? The United States is 3.5 billion square miles and 275 million people with an annual gross domestic product of eleven point seven-five trillion dollars. The United States is an idea. No terrorist can threaten our existence as a nation, no terrorist can break our economy, no terrorist can take threaten the ideas and ideals this country is founded upon. Only we can do that.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

- Dune, Frank Herbert.