"Winning the Long War" and Effective Counterterrorism

I attended a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation this morning, and while normally these events are filled with uber-conservative bobble head dolls, this talk was actually pretty good. It had to do with the emerging intellectual effort intended to balance the needs of homeland security with those of the people who must actually live in the homeland.

James Carafano, author of the recent book "Winning the Long War" moderated the session and gave short pitch for his work. His basic thesis is that, in the early years of the Cold War, the academy and government cooperated closely to create the toolbox necessary to defeat the Soviet Union.

The only problem is, we're still fighting that war; we didn't win it. The third world was and continues to be the battleground between western liberalism and a variety of frighteningly radical political movements. We managed to beat back the Soviets, but once we asserted our hegemony we didn't really know what to do with the billions of people who were now looking to us for hope and help. Throughout the Cold War, we kept telling everyone we had the answers. Unfortunately, our answers were the same ones the Soviets had: huge cash transfers to friendly states and a huge troop presence in the unfriendly ones.

Oops.

The panelists this morning came from military and civilian backgrounds, but their primary gripe was the "stovepipe" problem. This is the notion that solutions, plans, ideas and knowledge about the world are contained within distinct and often antagonistic organizations that are unable to cooperate with one another to achieve shared goals. Department of State, Department of Defense, USAID, Department of Agriculture, FBI, CIA, NSA, state and local law enforcement, the university system, the think tank system, these people typically hate each other and address problems in fundamentally different ways. There is no coordinating body capable of bringing their diffuse information together and making it usable. The National Security Council is supposed to do this job, but in recent years it has simply become its own mini agency, taking part just as aggressively as the others in petty turf wars and interagency bickering.

The panelists believe that new legislation and an overhaul of the executive are needed to fix this problem, but in the meantime, they suggested an extension of professional training in "homeland security" at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These programs would combine training in terrorism, counterinsurgency, human rights, intelligence, conflict resolution, and law enforcement in an effort to create a new generation of thinkers and bureaucrats wrestling with the most important issues in the field.

There's just one problem. The panelists did not seem conscious of the fact that the biggest gap in our knowledge about terrorism is HOW TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM BECOMING TERRORISTS. We know how to kill people really really well. We are so much better at it than they are it's not even funny. What we don't know how to do is save ourselves from the necessity of killing them. We don't know how to actually keep them from wanting to kill us. Until we figure that out, there will still be attacks, there will still be suicide bombings, and there will still be lines of disillusioned young people lining up to be killed until we run out of bullets or our trigger fingers get tired.

That is not how anybody wants this conflict to work out, so put your thinking caps on.