Support for America's 'war on terror' is evaporating as al-Qaeda's tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq reduces support for these wars in the West, writes Richard Whelan
The recently published Pew Global Attitude Survey contains bad news for the US "war on terror". The latest survey - published in two parts this June and July - shows that support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has declined worldwide.
More worryingly, in the vast majority of countries surveyed, support for the war on terror has dropped significantly since 2002. There are decreases of at least 25 per cent in France, Britain, Poland, Germany and Italy. Support for the US-led war remains at or above 50 per cent in very few countries, while the level of support in some key countries - Canada 37 per cent, Britain 38 per cent, Turkey 9 per cent, Pakistan 13 per cent, Indonesia 32 per cent, China 26 per cent, Japan 40 per cent, and India 49 per cent - is symptomatic of a widely-perceived sense of failure. Citizens of the West and in Muslim states are clearly stating their lack of support.
What the world is facing is a global insurgency that uses terror as a tactic and magnifies the impact of such through the use of technology and the media. The primary target is Muslim hearts and minds.
The latest information from the Pew research centre, the internationally respected non-partisan so-called fact tank based in Washington DC, clearly shows that the battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims, and western citizens, is now being lost by the US.
What is also remarkable is that the US wrote the script for al-Qaeda to achieve this. There are remarkable similarities between al-Qaeda's tactics and a US Marine Corps strategy document published in 1989, an astonishing piece of crystal-ball gazing that took place 18 years ago. Al-Qaeda has publicly acknowledged the debt it owes the military strategists at the Marine Corps Gazette.
The notion of what is called Fourth Generation Warfare, mooted by the gazette in October 1989, provides a blueprint for how the weak can defeat the strong. In al-Qaeda's words, "the superiority of the theoretically weaker party has already been proven; in many instances, nation-states have been defeated by stateless nations".
This is from a February 2002 internet publication in which al-Qaeda also notes that fourth generation warfare tactics were used in Somalia to defeat US forces and kill 18 US servicemen in the famous Black Hawk Down incident, after which all US troops were withdrawn by president Clinton.
Perhaps the clearest example of how terror and technology have changed the nature of warfare is contained in one sentence in the Marine Corps article: "Today, the US is spending $500 million apiece for stealth bombers. A terrorist stealth bomber is a car with a bomb in the trunk - a car that looks like every other car."
Fourth generation warfare is a concept used to explain changes in the way wars are waged. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648), asserted the right of nation states to go to war. The Napoleonic wars are seen as phase one, the industrial wars up to the first World War as phase two, and the manoeuvre warfare based on infiltration tactics first used during the German Spring Offensive in 1918 phase three.
We are now in the fourth phase - according to the strategists in the Marine Corps Gazette - and al-Qaeda is successfully road-testing this phase. It has four main elements. Some are self-evident.
"Small, highly manoeuvrable agile forces are key. As they were at the Madrid and Bali bombings, in London, New York and elsewhere.
In the new dispensation, attacks are widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point.
The distinction between civilian and military may disappear. In contrast, the Battle of Waterloo began and ended on one afternoon.
As al-Qaeda regards all states in the world as illegitimate, al-Qaedaists are entitled to "live off the land" anywhere. In practice they have restricted such activities mainly to the West, where robbery, credit card fraud etc is seen as the acquisition of booty. We citizens of the West are combatants in al-Qaeda's eyes because we support "illegitimate states" through either voting for, or paying taxes, to them.
The goal is to collapse the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him - through targeting the population's support for war and the enemy's culture. Al-Qaeda tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan - where at least 50 people, many of them children, were murdered yesterday by a suicide bomber - are clearly targeted at reducing support for these wars in the West. Somalia is proof to them that the West will eventually cut-and-run, and that in the long term its culture will inevitably collapse.
The Marine Corps article predicted that if the above elements of fourth generation warfare were combined with terrorism, technology and three specific features, the impact would be particularly destabilising. The three features are: a transnational base in ideology and/or religion, a direct attack on the country's culture (drug trafficking was their example), and sophisticated manipulation of the media. All are critical features of the al-Qaeda campaign.
In responding to this very different form of warfare, the lessons of previous insurgencies, such as Vietnam, are an important guide. Losing the support of Muslims worldwide and of western citizens almost certainly guarantees defeat. Invading countries such as Iraq does not help that process, and we know now that the US was wrong to link Saddam with al-Qaeda as justification.
The US and the EU must refocus their strategy so it is no longer seen as an attack on Islam by the West. They need to fashion a campaign to help the majority of Muslims to resist this attack from within.
The Pew survey - showing declining Muslim support for Bin Laden and suicide bombings - suggests this can be done. This will require a fundamental change in how this war is fought to a situation where western hard power (ie military power) is mainly applied indirectly and significant soft power (ie aid, investment, education, skills training, etc), is applied directly.
Eventually the trend of declining support for military adventures revealed by the Pew survey will make this a political imperative for the West. Applying the lessons learned now could save thousands of lives.