In The New Yorker
First, the good news. An Australian Army officer and anthropologist, David Kilcullen, has an office at the US State Department, where he works on a strategy of "Disaggregation" that might prove as useful in the "war on terror" as the policy of containment was helpful in the Cold War. Item number one on Lt Col Kilcullen's list would presumably be to ditch the phrase "war on terror," and replace it with "effective counterinsurgency." The basic idea is to isolate potential jihadi hot zones from one another and to deal with each one individually, paying particular attention to local needs and complaints. Localizing insurgents makes it far easier to undermine them; just about the worst thing that you can do is lump all the bad apples together into something really dumb, like the "axis of evil." Henry Crumpton, Lt Col Kilcullen's boss, says,
It's really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms. The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat. The threat is big enough without us having to exaggerate it.
The bad news is that this new way of dismantling insurgency - which is not very new at all - probably won't be taken seriously until the current incumbent is no longer President of the United States.
George Packer's report, "Knowing the Enemy: Can social scientists redefine the 'war on terror'?", does not, unfortunately, appear online at The New Yorker's site. It is very worth rustling up. For one thing, it's encouraging, and we can all use a little encouragement on the war front.
As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad. As for America, this success has more to do with luck than with strategy.
As always, the moral of the story is to ask "What would George do?", and then do the complete opposite.
