How odd to hear an appeal these days to halt the war on terror. It is odder yet that such an appeal should come from inside the US whose president declared the war on terror shortly after coming to power eight years ago and who has stuck to it adamantly ever since in spite of all the catastrophes it has wrought. Yet no less respectable a source than the Christian Science Monitor has issued just such an appeal beneath the headline "Stop the 'War' on Terror." Naturally, the newspaper does not suggest raising a white flag. It merely claims that reliance on military force in the fight against terrorism has not only been ineffective but also counterproductive: it has actually fed terrorism at the cost of inconceivable sums of money and huge amounts of effort. The article's authors, Seth Jones and Martin Libicki, write that after studying the record of 648 terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006, they found that military force has rarely been effective in defeating this enemy. Much more effective have been political settlements or joint policing and intelligence efforts that, they say, have brought an end to more than three-quarters of those terrorist groups during the period under study. They further observe that Al-Qaeda, in particular, has succeeded in overcoming many major setbacks, including the capture or death of senior operatives and obstructing its sources of funding. Moreover, it has carried out more terrorist attacks after 11 September than before, expanded the geographical scope of its operations and developed more sophisticated methods and organisational structures. This resurgence alone, they write, should be sufficient to trigger an overhaul of US counterterrorism strategy. According to Jones and Libicki, some of America's allies, such as Britain and Australia, have already stopped thinking of the fight against terrorism as a "war" with a battlefield solution. In Britain, the government shuns armed force and promotes dialogue whenever possible in its dealings with the IRA. It has long since discovered that military force often has the opposite effect from what is intended, that it is overused, alienates the local population because of its attendant human rights abuses against civilians, and is a boon to terrorist recruiters. As dangerous as terrorist organisations may be, the heavy-handed recourse to military force on the part of international powers may sometimes generate sympathy with the terrorists. This is especially the case when "war" on terrorism feeds the concept of jihad or holy war, which has the power to attract the more naïve or fanatic members of the populace to the ranks of terrorists by elevating them to "holy warriors". The enormous amount of money that has so far been futilely spent in Bush's war on terror adds another logical argument in favour of a change in tactics. Between 2001 and 2007, about 90 per cent of the $609 billion authorised by Congress for counterterrorism has been spent on military operations alone. Surely allocating this sum to improving standards of living in areas over which terrorists seek to assert control would have gone a long way to alleviating the despair and frustration that drive many youths to extremism and terrorism. The major obstacle to this call to halt the war on terror is that the demands of some terrorist organisations leave little room for dialogue. Al-Qaeda, for example, seeks to overturn systems of government in many Arab and Islamic countries, destroy Israel and expel US forces from the Middle East, and tries to resurrect Andalusian Spain and revive the Islamic caliphate. At the same time, the US and other great powers have interests and ambitions that terrorist organisations would never contemplate accepting. All of which leads us to the question: can the generals of war and the lords of terror meet halfway?
