Terrorism will not be defeated militarily

guest commentary by Daniel Maher

Editor’s note: This commentary is part of a collaboration between the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and The City Wire to deliver an ongoing series of political-based essays and reports. Daniel Maher is the assistant professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. His published works are “Vice in the Veil of Justice: Embedding Race and Gender in Frontier Tourism” (University of Arkansas, 2013) and “Mythic Frontiers: Remembering, Forgetting, and Profiting with Cultural Heritage Tourism” (University Press of Florida, 2016 estimated). He can be reached at [email protected]

Opinions, commentary and other essays posted in this space are wholly the view of the author(s). They may not represent the opinion of the owners of Talk Business & Politics or the administration of the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.
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Terrorism cannot be defeated militarily. Every terrorist act is a victory. A successful terrorist act is equivalent to winning a war. If a terrorist act terrorizes, then it has fully and completely accomplished its goal of planting terror in our minds.

On the morning of 9/11 I gave serious consideration to how I personally thought the United States should respond to the attacks in New York City and Washington D.C.

My conclusion was that no military action would be better than any in the long run. In the short run it might make some people feel good – vengeance is mine, but in the long run it would only create more terrorism, and worse yet, more greatly determined terrorists.

To be clear, my critique here is not against our brave, courageous soldiers. It is against the foreign and domestic policies that have been used the past 15 years.

The inability to militarily defeat terrorism is self-evident. The removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and the failure to create stable governments in their wake created a regional power-vacuum that looks to be far from finding any semblance of equilibrium. If somehow al-Qaeda and the Islamic State were to be defeated, a recent study suggests there are at least 15 other extremist groups in waiting to take their place. The actions of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent destabilization of the region have guaranteed us zealous enemies for generations to come.

The “battle for hearts and minds” has been an even greater, abysmal failure. The number of civilian casualties alone in war-torn regions is enough to harden the hearts of those we are trying to help. The Watson Institute at Brown University estimates that 210,000 civilians died “violent deaths” in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2002 and 2015. Another report declared that 500,000 have died from war related causes in Iraq alone. Regardless of the disparity in estimates, these are the sort of numbers that people there will not soon forget.

Meanwhile, Americans suffer from a long-recurring collective amnesia about embarrassing, humiliating, immoral acts it has perpetrated during times of war. For example, the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib has either slipped from popular consciousness, or is denied to ever have been torture. Forgetting and denying such horrors, combined with virtually never registering civilian casualties, not to mention basking in the cold anonymity of drone strikes, creates a tragic American hubris when it comes to foreign policy – witness the reality-show-presidential-campaign where “carpet bombing” the Islamic State is so casually tossed about.

In addition to foreign terrorist threats, we have a good deal of home-grown domestic terrorism to contend with. There is little difference between radicalized, fundamentalist fanatics, whether they be Muslim or Christian, Islamic State or KKK. Again, there is collective amnesia when it comes to domestic terrorism, especially when committed by white Christian men. African Americans have dealt with violence sanctioned by or perpetrated by the political state for centuries. Thousands of lynches, and harassing, abusive, frequently fatal, encounters with communities and law enforcement who harm with impunity, is nothing short of terrorism.

Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City and Robert Dear at Planned Parenthood, have demonstrated that Christianity contains within it the same capacity for fueling violence and terroristic murder as much as any religion. In a recent book, “Living in the Crosshairs, “David Cohen and Krysten Connon make a convincing argument that those who commit violence, frequently self-identified as Christians, against individuals employed in providing legally sanctioned abortions, should be defined as and tried as terrorists. Abortion is legal and as such, citizens accessing it should be given the full protection of the political state that sanctions it.

America’s love affair with war, guns, and violence is longstanding, complicated, and haunting.

The United States has not been innocent in these national or world affairs. It should be remembered that Timothy McVeigh struck on April 19, 1995, because it was the two year anniversary of the disastrous conclusion of the standoff in Waco, Texas, between the Branch Dravidians and federal law enforcement. We propped up Bin Laden when the Soviets were in Afghanistan and we supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. I dislike clichés as much as the next anthropologist, but politics certainly does make strange bedfellows. None of this legitimates any terrorism, it simply makes it more explicable.

Shortly after 9/11, 20 Nobel Peace prize winners were asked what they thought to be the greatest cause of terrorism. Virtually every one of them cited poverty as the primary cause. Whether it be foreign or domestic, terrorism is grown from seeds of poverty and ignorance. Individuals who are impoverished, who feel oppressed, weak, and threatened, lash out with powerful weapons against innocent, weak victims, and often take comfort in extreme fundamentalist manifestations of religion.

Two clear solutions to terrorism are to reduce economic inequality at the global and national levels and increase access to education. Legal and economic structures have created great disparities in inequality, which compounds the lack of access to education that would assist people in transcending their poverty.

Naïve? Yes. But, it’s not hard to imagine what a different world we would be living in had we taken the billions of dollars spent on war in the Middle East in the past 15 years, and spent it on education, public health, and infrastructure. Alas, it took President Obama until his eighth year in office to visit a mosque in the United States. So much for educating Americans about religious diversity.

I believe it is more naïve to believe war and violence will defeat terrorism and bring lasting peace, than it is to believe we can defeat terrorism by addressing economic inequality and creating an educated citizenry.

As Leymah Gbowee, who led a non-violent approach to ending civil war in Liberia in 2003, contends, if violence could bring peace and stability we’d have a healthy dose of it by now.