We are now in the eighth year of a very long war. It is longer than World War I or World War II, as long as the major period of combat in Vietnam, one third of the length of the Napoleonic wars. It is as complex, as multidimensional and as polyvalent as any of these conflicts. It lacks overarching narratives and is chaotic and diffuse.
This war is also currently anonymous. This should not surprise us either. Few conflicts are named while they are ongoing, particularly wars as complex as this one. Those at Bosworth would have been surprised to know they were fighting in the Wars of the Roses, those fighting at Castillon that they could claim to be veterans of the Hundred Years’ War.
However, after yet another week dominated by news from the front — a scare on a US-bound jet, a bomb at a volleyball match in Pakistan that killed 90, an attack on a Danish cartoonist — it is worth trying to take a big step back and look at the whole course of this conflict. At the very least, this may help us determine where we are and what we can expect.
Looking back, we can distinguish five acts. Act One started with the immediate, spectacular event of Sept. 11, followed by the war in Afghanistan. Act Two was the relative lull — almost a phony war — in 2002 and early 2003. There were bombs in Tunisia, Indonesia and elsewhere, a series of scares and fighting in Afghanistan, but the apocalyptic scenarios that many had feared were not realized. Perhaps, some began to think, the world had not changed as much as had been thought.
Then came the invasion of Iraq and Act Three. This saw a major intensification of what had hitherto been a conflict relatively restricted in physical extent and scale, and it looked as though the pessimists had been right. A tide of radicalization and political consciousness crashed across the Islamic world. As Iraq plunged into savage chaos, bombs went off across the Middle East. Eventually, the wave of violence washed into Europe with attacks in Spain and in the UK.
At the same time, there came a sharpening of communitarian divisions, emotions and rhetoric. Language was intemperate, full of fear and outrage. When French urban youth rioted, it was a European “intifada.” When an obscure Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, crowds whipped up by rabble-rousing clerics poured on to the streets screaming of Western campaigns to humiliate and divide Muslims. These were the darkest days so far.
Act Four, however, saw something more positive. For, even in the worst of the chaos, various trends were heading in a more positive direction. Key among them was public opinion in the Islamic world.
There was a riptide running against the wave of violence. As each successive bomb had gone off, tens of millions of people had turned away from such atrocious acts. This did not mean that they were no longer angry at the US, Israel, the West or all the other subjects of their grievances. It did not mean that they accepted the Western model of globalization. But it did mean that they no longer saw the tactics of al-Qaeda as a legitimate way to resolve problems.
One of the best examples was Jordan where, before the bombing of hotels in the capital Amman of November 2005, polls showed nearly two-thirds of locals had confidence in Osama bin Laden “to do the right thing in world affairs.” After the blasts, the level dropped to 24 percent.
In Turkey, only 3 percent backed bin Laden by 2005, down from 15 percent three years earlier. The same phenomenon could be seen in Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. While the violence and its victims remained abstract, it could be supported. However, when it meant your policemen, your soldiers and your neighbors were killed and your economy ruined, that was very different.
Improvements were seen in Iraq in 2007. New troops ordered in by then US president George W. Bush in a radical new strategy arrived when three critical developments were well under way.
First, Shiites had largely taken much of the physical and political territory that could be taken from the weakened Sunni minority with relative ease and so the civil war was running out of steam. Second, Shiite militia groups that had been fighting the Sunnis and the Americans had been critically weakened by a massive breakdown in discipline and organization, which meant they lost legitimacy with the poor populations they were supposed to be representing and protecting.
Third, and most significantly, the Sunni communities in provinces like Anbar had turned against al-Qaeda-affiliated militants. Forced eventually to decide between their own interests and the international militants’ ideology and aims, the tribes chose the local over the global. They rejected the “freedom” brought on the back of a tank by the Americans. But they also rejected the world view, equally disrespectful of local cultural context, of al-Qaeda. Things in Iraq took a very relative turn for the better.
In Europe, too, more sophisticated, better-organized and better-resourced security services, a better understanding of the problem, a more sensible public debate and a new British government prepared to drop the ideologically charged language of its predecessor all consolidated the more positive evolution. The center had held.
The climb away from the nadir of the middle of the decade was slow but steady. At the beginning of 2010, support for bin Laden in the Muslim world continues to decline and violence is at a level that is worrying but no longer perceived as an existential threat to our societies.
What will Act Five bring? The most obvious answer is Afghanistan.
While attention was focused on other sub-conflicts of the war, the Taliban were allowed to re-establish themselves in large parts of the country that they once ran. This year will see more fighting as US troops surge there. But they, along with British forces, are scheduled to be withdrawn in 2011. People in the West are tired now of this apparently unending conflict and want, if not peace, then at least lower levels of commitment.
The surge and the combat that will undoubtedly accompany it may turn out to be the dead cat bounce of this long war. Pakistan will see more horrific bombings but is unlikely to implode. The radicalization that is an integral part of this conflict will continue to mean individual acts of violence like that which saw a young Somalian attack the Danish author of the controversial 2005 cartoons. But it is almost possible to imagine a day when news from the multiple fronts of this conflict no longer dominates bulletin after bulletin.
Will that mean that this conflict will eventually get a name? It is winners who name wars on the whole and it is difficult to see many candidates for that title right now. Al-Qaeda has lost many of its key leaders and has achieved few of its core aims. The complex phenomenon that is contemporary Islamic militancy remains as disunited as ever, there has been no general uprising of the Islamic masses, the establishment of an Islamic caliphate hardly looks imminent, nor has the West been weakened in the way that was hoped.
The only governments overthrown in the Islamic world were deposed by the West. And costly though Sept. 11 was, the financial crisis arguably did more economic damage than all the efforts of Islamic militants over the decade.
The fact that the US has been able to pay for the grotesque strategic error of the war in Iraq and a 10-year conflict in Afghanistan, all while financing a huge security industry at home, reveals the extraordinary resilience of the US economy.
In Europe, too, though civil liberties have suffered, the problems that looked to be looming in 2005 or 2006 have not materialized. After its military and diplomatic checks in Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain may well have to finally renounce its inflated self-image as a power that “punches above its weight” on the world stage, but more generally, Western societies and political systems appear likely to digest this latest wave of radical violence as they have digested its predecessors. Nor has the Middle East suffered the meltdown that some predicted.
But then, it is difficult to say that the West has won. The threat remains. Few of this global conflict’s root causes have been dealt with and any improvements are fragile. In December 2004, when Bush had just been re-elected and was preparing his triumphal second inauguration, the official quadrennial intelligence review by US agencies had predicted “continued US dominance.”
The same agencies reported last year that the US would soon no longer be able to “call the shots” alone as its power over an increasingly multipolar planet begins to wane. If this is a victory, then the US cannot afford many more like it.
Losers in this conflict are not hard to find, however.
They are the huge numbers of men, women and children who found themselves caught in multiple crossfires: the victims of Sept. 11 and the London and Madrid bombings, those who died in sectarian killings in Baghdad, those killed in badly aimed US missile strikes or by suicide bombs in Afghanistan, those executed in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and those simply in the wrong place at the wrong time — the casualties of this chaotic matrix of multivalent, confused but always lethal wars.
But losers don’t decide what to call wars. If there is one prediction that one can make with reasonable certainty, it is that no one is likely to find an appropriate name for this particular conflict soon.
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