Misjudged enemy, wrong means chosen, missed target: Twenty years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the West is facing the shards of its failure - not only in Afghanistan, but also in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen. What went wrong in the fight against terror? And what lessons should Europe learn from this?
An essay by Kristin Helberg Kristin Helberg is a journalist and political scientist. She reported from Damascus for seven years, has written several books on Syria and now lives in Berlin as an author and Middle East expert.
There it is again, that word: "total failure". The West has failed across the board in Afghanistan, intellectuals, journalists, politicians and academics unanimously sum up, just as it did in Syria and Iraq, Libya and Yemen. A rhetorical sweeping blow - as justified as it is misleading. For the failure of the West in the crises of the past twenty years is not based on the same wrong strategy over and over again, but is the result of highly different approaches.
The USA and Europe pursued hegemonic interests and disregarded local conditions, they say. Sometimes they intervened too much, sometimes too little. In some places they wanted too much in too short a time, in others they behaved haphazardly and hesitantly. In the end, they either lacked determination and the courage to act, or they lacked patience and strategic staying power. In short, no matter how the Americans and Europeans got involved in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, things always went wrong. The West stabilised corrupt, authoritarian rulers, abandoned local partners and lost credibility.
How can it be that all attempts to positively influence the region have failed so miserably? That most people there are worse off than ever before?
Widespread poverty and the misery of refugees, state failure and collapse, mafia-like structures and extremism, injustice, subjugation and fear of state and non-state violence determine the everyday lives of millions of people between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush. Yet they should have been living in freedom and democracy long ago, under pro-Western governments and with equal opportunities for education and prosperity.
The war on terror is based on false assessments
This is not only what US President George W. Bush (2001-2009) planned with his logic of regime change and democracy export, but also what his successor Barack Obama (2009-2017) promised with military withdrawal and cooperation on an equal footing. This is how the populations themselves demanded it from 2011 onwards, by courageously demonstrating, partly overthrowing their hated elites and voting democratically. And this is how even America-first President Donald Trump (2017-2021) sounded, who wanted to sell more American weapons in return and leave the rest to his buddies on the ground.
They all pursued the same goal, only with different means. And they all failed. The reason for this lies deeper - it is the concept of the war on terror, which is based on false assessments and thus led to strategic mistakes.
Let us look back. After the end of the Cold War, the West thought that its victorious model - freedom, democracy, market economy - would sooner or later prevail worldwide. No more need to wage proxy wars in Asia or install generals in South America. But then Al-Qaida came along and seemingly confirmed US political scientist Samuel Huntington's thesis of the clash of civilisations - Islam rose to become the West's new world enemy, the war on terror became its foreign policy doctrine.
Instead of preventing the spread of communism, the task from then on was to contain militant Islamism. Unfortunately, the West chose the same wrong means to do so - military firepower, dubious allies and moral verbiage - a combination that proved ineffective against globally networked terrorists. For the new enemy was not so easy to locate and ideologically took advantage of the West's hypocrisy. And in the pursuit of security and stability, the West betrayed its liberal values - both internally and externally. How could it have come to this?
The errors of Western policy
Under the shock of the attacks of 11 September 2001, US President Bush declared war on an unknown enemy. The entire civilised world was under attack and had to defend itself by all means, was the narrative that became entrenched in the capitals of the Western hemisphere. This obvious perception, however, contained three flaws in its short-sightedness.
First, the US was dealing neither with a hostile regime nor with a state-ordered attack, but with a privately financed network of ideologised criminals. The assassins came from allied countries (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon), their weapons were airline tickets, rental cars, English language skills, credit cards and box cutters.
By declaring war on the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, the US upgraded them from criminals to combatants, giving them the very legitimacy they lacked as non-state actors. A self-proclaimed army of jihadists wanted to wage war against the "godless West" and this West did it the favour. The USA went into a war with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and trillions of dollars that it could not win. And which therefore produced even more terror in the end.
Secondly, Americans and Europeans fell for the supposed antagonism between "Islam" and the "West". Jihadists, who unlike Islamists pursue an international agenda, take what they need from the Koran to derive a political ideology.
Osama Bin Laden fought against decadence, injustice and foreign domination - against the double standards of Saudi princes, the oppression of Muslims, Soviet troops in Afghanistan and American military bases in the Gulf. His campaign was a political one, not a religious one - the victims of this jihad terror are 90 per cent Muslim.
That is why the ideologists of Al-Qaeda, Islamic State (IS) and Co. are not followed by pious Muslims with profound Koranic expertise, but by frustrated young people who are either without prospects or filled with a deep sense of injustice. Most of them have little idea about Islam and are therefore easily influenced and recruited.
This is especially true of lone wolves in the West who radicalise themselves via the internet.
Placing 1.9 billion Muslims under general suspicion because a few thousand misuse their religion for political purposes and discredit it with terrorist attacks has given extremism a further boost. For the anti-terror campaign, flanked by a tendency towards Islamophobic reporting and polemics, confirmed the terrorists' propaganda of Muslims in the West being discriminated against. Instead of making Muslim fellow citizens allies in the fight against militant Islamists, we feared young men with beards and backpacks in the underground and discussed teachers wearing headscarves.
Away from the rule of law
The third error in thinking stemmed from a sense of existential threat. Western governments promised their citizens security and passed laws in return, which in the end also played into the hands of the jihadists. Everything was subordinated to the fight against terrorism, both in domestic and foreign policy.
In order to protect a free society as a whole, internal security measures were adopted that restricted individuals in their fundamental rights and freedoms. Travel regulations, security standards, video surveillance, storage of telecommunication data, recording of biometric characteristics, dragnet searches and police checks were justified after 9/11 with a political and legal state of emergency, but have become legal practice and part of everyday life in many places. The USA authorised its executive to kidnap terror suspects, lock them up in secret prisons without trial, have them interrogated and abused by friendly intelligence services or torture them themselves by fake drowning.
In the face of a seemingly omnipresent terrorist threat, Americans and Europeans moved away from their own moral standards and rule-of-law principles. They hollowed out their liberal-democratic orders from within and thus became untrustworthy in their criticism of others' authoritarian methods of rule. The jihadists had permanently shaken the liberal model of society and thus won another victory.
This security logic also shaped relations with other states and regions from 2001 onwards. Intelligence, police and military cooperation with allies was expanded - not only within NATO. From then on, the EU's Mediterranean partnership with the Mediterranean countries was also based on the premise of the fight against terrorism. This was accompanied by an inflationary use of the term "terror", which was extended to national, democratically elected Islamist organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
The war on terror was thus doomed to failure - the enemy misjudged, the means wrongly chosen, the target imprecisely determined.
"Each US ally was hunting its own personal terrorists".
These three misjudgements had disastrous consequences for the people in the Near and Middle East. Due to tightened entry regulations, they could hardly travel to the US and Europe. To ward off "radical Islamic terrorists", Trump even imposed a general ban on entry for citizens from Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan and Iran in 2017. Personal exchange, study, professional development and cultural understanding were thus made more difficult, and prejudices and defensive reflexes were reinforced.
The term "terror" was never precisely defined. In talks in Jerusalem, Ankara, Riyadh and Cairo, the common fight against terror was invoked, but each understood something different. Israel fought Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, Ankara the PKK. In Saudi Arabia, critical bloggers were persecuted, in Egypt opposition members and Muslim Brothers. Following the example of the Americans and Europeans, anti-terror laws were passed that legalised state repression and thus mutated into an all-purpose weapon against unwelcome opponents. Under the pretext of supporting the West in its war on terror, each US ally hunted down its own personal "terrorists".
Everyone else feared American aggression. Because anyone who was not one of their friends in 2001 quickly ended up on the "axis of evil" and felt threatened by regime change. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a militarily induced regime change was a real danger, especially for Syria and Iran, with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers already at the borders. In view of the devastating conditions in Iraq, however, the Syrians preferred gradual reforms from within rather than a violent overthrow from outside and continued to hope for ruler Bashar al-Assad.
The latter used the US threat to discredit any critic, however moderate, as a stooge of the West and a traitor. External pressure led to internal pressure. It was similar in Iran, where the religious hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was able to stay in power for eight years with his anti-American polemics. With Bush in the White House, there was no chance of opening up and renewal in the "axis of evil".
Consequently, the 2000s were a lost decade in the Middle East. The anti-terror war prevented domestic political developments among friends and enemies of the West. They all relied on repression instead of reforms and thus prepared the ground for the uprisings in 2011.
Until then, the USA had learned one thing above all from its interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq: overthrowing regimes from the outside carries the danger of becoming militarily bogged down for years and thereby turning from liberator to occupier. In Afghanistan, encouraged by their quick success against Al-Qaida, they got involved in the fight against Taliban rule and got carried away with nation building. In Iraq, it was not about terror, but about oil. By toppling not only Saddam Hussein but his entire power apparatus - Ba'ath party officials, police, soldiers and intelligence officers - the Americans laid the foundations for a resistance that attracted jihadists from all over the world.
Iraq became the new centre of global terror, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq later developed into IS. In both countries, the West fuelled ethnic and sectarian conflicts that led to one-sided power relations, further injustice and brutal retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died.
Peaceful demonstrators against Western-aligned despots
The neo-conservative megalomania of the Bush administration had torpedoed any effort to fight terrorism effectively. Obama's successor promised no further interventions and fought jihadists preferably with drones. For peaceful demonstrators and armed insurgents who rebelled against pseudo-secular and Western-aligned despots from 2011 onwards, this meant that they were largely on their own and exposed to massive violence.
Egyptians drove out Hosni Mubarak, elected the Muslim Brotherhood and have suffered since 2013 under the military dictatorship of General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who is misunderstood by the West as a "guarantor of stability". Many have lost their faith in democratic elections and the rule of law. In Yemen, the domestic power struggle between the government, the Southern Transitional Council and the Huthis has developed into a multi-front war between the regional powers Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran. The West is fuelling the conflict by supplying weapons to the Saudis and Emiratis, but otherwise keeping a low profile. People are starving, two million young children are malnourished, humanitarian aid is blocked, cholera, diphtheria and measles are back.
Moreover, Yemen - like Iraq, Syria and Lebanon - has become the scene of the duel between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The rivalries of the two regional hegemons influence almost all conflicts in the Middle East; Tehran has been able to significantly expand its influence via allied Shiite militias. In order to weaken Iran, the Gulf states are now even getting involved with Israel, the former arch-enemy of the Arabs - to the chagrin of the Palestinians, who are further away than ever from having their own state or at least equal civil rights.
In Libya, NATO toppled Muammar al-Gaddafi in March 2011, but left the rest to the country's politicians, military and militia leaders. These fight and enrich themselves at the expense of the population, profiting from the disintegration of state structures. Here, too, others are setting the tone militarily; Russia and Turkey are supporting the various parties to the conflict with mercenary troops.
Syria: The height of immoral hypocrisy
After the Libyan experience, Moscow decided to keep its last ally in the Middle East - Syria's strongman Assad - in power at all costs, and the West decided to stay out of it as much as possible. A few light weapons here, a new hospital there, targeted sanctions, human rights workshops and diplomatic window dressing - that's all the Americans and Europeans were prepared to do. Assad and his saviours Russia and Iran have therefore been murdering unhindered for years. With incendiary and cluster bombs, sarin and chlorine gas, with systematic torture, starvation blockades, displacement and barrel bombs, they brought large parts of Syria back under their control.
The West refused to protect Syrian civilians from air strikes. No protection or no-fly zones without a UN mandate, so the argument goes. However, for their own bombing raids from 2014 onwards on areas under IS rule, the US and its anti-IS coalition did not need a Security Council resolution - that was, after all, war on terror. All they needed were allies on the ground - those Kurdish fighters who risked their lives and are now left with the remains of the caliphate in the form of tens of thousands of prisoners, radicalised women and children, foreign IS members and attacks from the underground. In Syria, the West reached the pinnacle of immoral hypocrisy with its anti-terror logic.
Lessons from the failed anti-terror fight
What are the lessons to be learned from this multi-layered failure? What lessons can be learned and how could Germans and like-minded Europeans do better? They can no longer count on the Americans in the Middle East - thanks to fracking, they have made themselves independent of the Gulf states with their domestic oil and gas production and are concentrating their foreign policy on the power struggle with China and thus the Indo-Pacific region. Europe has to take care of its neighbourhood itself, reckoning with Russia, which has taken over the role as a power of order since the US withdrawal. Six lessons emerge after 20 years of fighting terrorism.
First, regime change and socio-political change must come from within. A democratic constitutional state can neither be forced with weapons nor bought with money, especially when both are combined on the ground in an absurd "civil-military cooperation". Those who need the protection of soldiers to build schools and roads are not perceived as friends, but at best as strangers.
Secondly, a life in dignity without state injustice, freedom of expression, equality before the law and political co-determination are not Western export goods, but universal values that people in many places in the world stand up for. Supporting them and standing by them in an emergency should be a foreign policy concern of Europeans. And this in the awareness that it took one and a half centuries for women to become citizens in Europe. This means modesty, sensitivity and respect in cooperation paired with determination when danger threatens. Then civil society partners do not need expressions of solidarity, but quick visas, evacuations or shelters.
Thirdly, these comrades-in-arms would often be helped if the West did not get involved with corrupt elites, authoritarian politicians and perpetrators of violence in their home countries. These do not bring stability, but a lack of prospects, injustice and a desire for revenge, thus creating the best conditions for extremism. Those who supply autocrats with weapons, make warlords into politicians and cooperate with drug traffickers and mafiosi to enforce their own interests have chosen the wrong allies.
In Afghanistan, the shameless corruption of the government and the injustice that goes with it in the form of bribed judges, arbitrary violence and illegal land grabs has paved the way for the Taliban to return to power. For they promise what matters most to many Afghans: Incorruptibility and justice.
High time for a paradigm shift
Fourth, we should align our foreign policy compass with these two qualities. Instead of asking who will fight with us against terror and then turning a blind eye to human rights abuses, we should examine how a potential ally treats its supporters and its critics. It is not without reason that Egyptians and Tunisians voted for the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda in their first democratic elections.
Islamist parties are seen as non-corrupt and socially committed - two qualities that are very important in a region full of power- and money-hungry rulers and may sometimes seem more important to local people than freedom and self-determination.
Financial aid and development funds should no longer flow to corrupt state apparatuses and businessmen, but rather as directly as possible to local and international non-governmental organisations that do not focus on personal gain but on the common good.
Fifth, terrorist networks and caliphate areas can be dismantled by military means, but not ideologically defeated. After 20 years of anti-terror war, a few thousand Al-Qaeda members have become tens of thousands of jihadists - organised in loose networks and sub-groups of the IS, spread across Africa and Asia with followers also in America and Europe.
They do not need orders to carry out attacks, but inspiration. All they need to spread terror is a car or a kitchen knife.
Instead of adapting our liberal model of society, which is based on the rule of law, individual responsibility and equal opportunities, to the authoritarian surveillance thinking of the jihadists, we should make it attractive for all citizens.
Sixthly, there remains the question of military intervention. This should be exclusively for the protection of civilians and not for the overthrow of disagreeable dictators.
When a state or non-state actor commits crimes under international law - genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes or crimes against humanity - civilians must be protected from them.
Up to now, this has required a mandate from the UN Security Council, but the experience in Syria has made it necessary to go through the General Assembly. In the fight against globally operating terrorists - whether Islamist or right-wing nationalist motivated - the same means are helpful as against organised crime, supplemented by the targeted use of drones and special commandos. You don't have to invade anywhere to do it.
For two decades, the anti-terror doctrine has caused the West to fail. By subordinating all policy fields to the fight against terror, it not only lost sight of its principles, but also of pressing problems - global warming, overpopulation and unjust world trade. Solving them requires networked thinking and action, not unilateral declarations of war.
20 years after 9/11, it is therefore high time for a paradigm shift: the West is not at war. It should fight every form of extremism with the means of the rule of law, consider Muslims as allies and support and protect like-minded people worldwide.
Kristin Helberg
© Qantara.de 2021