There’s often a tension in counter-terrorism between the short-term and the long-term.
The approach towards the former is driven by the immediacy and the pursuit of tangible results that can be trumpeted to the media, political elite, and the general public. An ultimate example came just after 9-11 when high-level CIA officer Cofer Black instructed operatives going into Afghanistan that they should return with the head of Osama bin Laden in a box.
Tony Blair also embraced the short-term, most obviously a few weeks after the London attacks of 7 July 2005: the British Prime Minister, to the surprise of his own Home Secretary, called a press conference to announce that the “rules of the game are changing” and that new anti-terrorism laws would be enacted.While the grandstanding played well among the tabloid press, some of the measures were not well considered. They have had little impact and, indeed, have proven counterproductive for wider efforts seeking to improve cooperation between the police and “suspect communities”.
The application of “hard power” can undermine longer-term efforts based on “soft power” that may have proven to be more effective and lasting. This returns us to a topic which I have considered before in Terrorism Weekly: the sharp escalation of drone attacks in Pakistan under the Obama Administration.
In The New Yorker in October 2009, Jane Mayer offered a detailed look at the drone campaign and the reality that the targets of those attacks are far beyond al-Qaeda. Another article attempted to estimate the number of civilian casualties in the strikes. And on Thursday David Ignatius, a conduit for CIA opinion, noted that killings by drones had replaced capture and interrogation, working against the gathering of necessary intelligence for counter-terrorism efforts.
But, thanks to Wikileaks and the “data dump”, we now know that reservations over the drones are shared by US diplomats in Pakistan, specifically because the short-term gratification of killing suspected terrorists may undermine long-term efforts at achieving a stability that would undermine al-Qaeda. Ambassador Anne Patterson warned in a September 2009 cable that while “[u]nilateral targeting of al-Qaeda operatives and assets in these regions is an important component of dealing with the overall threat”, it would not force al-Qaeda out of tribal areas. Increased attacks ran the risk of “destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis in Pakistan without finally achieving the goal.” She added that success would only come through a long-term comprehensive strategy that addressed stability in Afghanistan and Pakistani concerns about India.
Will the Ambassador’s caution lead to a policy shift away from drones? No. The simple reason is that politicians, driven by short-term thinking, crave results the drone attacks with mounting deaths seem to supply.
But the problem with counter-terrorism of how to measure success remains. Donald Rumsfeld identified this quandary way back in 2003. His words are still apt:
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
The US needs to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists. However, Washington is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan while devoting a great deal of effort into a short-term casualty count. The US spends billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
For Washington, that is not a promising cost-benefit ratio.