Unpalatable Truths
Long experience on the front lines of counterterrorism serves up distasteful lessons: can we swallow them in the name of national security?
R. Kim Stevens '62 has worked in the field of counterterrorism throughout his career, for more than three decades as a foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State. Since retiring from the federal government in 1996, he has worked as a private consultant to foreign governments on matters of national security and counterterrorism.
American government officials have been talking, arguing, and disagreeing about how to counter what is now called terrorism for many decades, and other governments for decades before that. It was and still is no secret to anyone at the working level of our or any foreign government that there are only two ways to win against armed irregulars, regardless of their cause.
The first option is overwhelming force. In terms of boots on the ground, at least a twenty-to-one ratio, and enough firepower to kill everyone inside the "kill zones" that your troops establish. But use of overwhelming force and ruthless killing of everything that moves in a "kill zone" is not a popular tactic among democratic governments. Voters are sickened by the carnage and turned off by the financial and political costs of such heavy-handedness.
The other option is to know your enemy and fight them from the inside. Not more than several hundred personnel who know intimately the language and culture of the opposing irregular force can defeat them over time. It will take several years, and it will be done in a quiet but effective way. When is the last time you heard of the Red Brigades or the Red Army Faction--at one time organizations powerful enough to threaten modern democratic governments, but insignificant five years later. The British finally employed these tactics in Belfast and then began to prevail.
I recall interviewing the chief of police of a major European city once, asking how he planned to deal with the latest "terrorist" outrage. I was young and thought that mountains should be moved in reaction. But he just looked at me as his government was in full flap and said: "Nothing. We will do nothing special in response to this latest attack. We will continue to engage them on all fronts. We have more men and more money than they do. Eventually they will make a mistake. We will take advantage of that mistake and defeat them, one small battle at a time. But we must be given the time, and we must be allowed to be ruthless." Five years later I met him again at an ambassador's reception. He had accomplished his task, quietly but effectively. No one had ever seen his name on the front page.
But like use of overwhelming force, such low-level, up-close, down-and-dirty tactics are not popular at the political level in democracies. They often inspire revulsion in the public. Few prisoners are taken, and those that are soon need to "disappear." There is no respect for human rights on either side. It is a very dirty war. The several times that the United States has tried this approach--in Nicaragua, in Afghanistan--we messed it up by not following through. We arrested our own personnel for human rights violations, and did not have the stomach or the staying power to support our local allies. We kept our morality but lost the battles as a result.
How much risk will those of us on the ground be willing to run for a government that can easily prove to be ungrateful and in search of scapegoats? Bin Ladin would not have escaped the Tora-Bora encirclement--the biggest kill zone that U.S. forces have ever created--had General Franks not broken that circle by removing four dozen Special Forces troops from the back door. They were needed, he thought, to prepare for invading Iraq, a more important task in the eyes of his political masters. We have only ourselves to blame.
So, in the war on terrorism, we are our own worst enemies--and our enemies know it. The political level, tuned in daily to fickle mass public opinion, has no toleration for long-term operations, and cannot accept messy killing, especially of our own people or by our own people. If you are upset by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, you are probably a wonderful, caring person, but you are also a part of the problem in working the counterterrorist agenda. We need to be patient, imaginative, and flexible in our actions to defend our country and our children, while still preserving our values. We are, unfortunately, stuck with political leadership in both parties that is a bit short on imagination and political courage, and therefore we are bogged down doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the results to be different this time. They will not be. No civilian or soldier out there will do more than just go through the motions without political support back home. They know what needs to be done, and they know they will not be allowed to do it.
Professors Raymond English and Dennis Bailey did not teach me this at Kenyon. As they taught me about the world beyond Gambier, they also tried to instill in me a respect for the higher values that rolled down Middle Path from the Bexley Hall end. But I did learn more than Kenyon taught me from forty years of being in the front lines of both the Cold War and many little side wars. I have been shot at, at close range, in public and been the subject of plots to kidnap and kill me and my family (nothing personal, I was just a U.S. official overseas). Because I often felt, especially when working in Latin America, that I had more values in common with those who considered me the enemy than I did with my own government, it was especially difficult to persist. For forty years I have sought, desperately at times, diplomatic solutions to those issues that will lead to violence. But at the end of my career, I am forced to accept that violence remains the only way that intractable human issues can be bypassed or overcome. And that intractability seems to be a very human trait, regardless of our better thoughts about ourselves.
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