The story sets up the series of errors by stomping on the Bush administration's rejection of deterrence against jihadi enemies:
In the days immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, members of President Bush’s war cabinet declared that it would be impossible to deter the most fervent extremists from carrying out even more deadly terrorist missions with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
Then it goes on to argue that we've decided that deterrence works:
Since then, however, administration, military and intelligence officials assigned to counterterrorism have begun to change their view. After piecing together a more nuanced portrait of terrorist organizations, they say there is reason to believe that a combination of efforts could in fact establish something akin to the posture of deterrence, the strategy that helped protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear attack during the cold war.
Ah, nuance! Is there nothing this magical European invention can't accomplish?
The authors then go full bore into delusional analysis:
Interviews with more than two dozen senior officials involved in the effort provided the outlines of previously unreported missions to mute Al Qaeda’s message, turn the jihadi movement’s own weaknesses against it and illuminate Al Qaeda’s errors whenever possible.
A primary focus has become cyberspace, which is the global safe haven of terrorist networks. To counter efforts by terrorists to plot attacks, raise money and recruit new members on the Internet, the government has mounted a secret campaign to plant bogus e-mail messages and Web site postings, with the intent to sow confusion,
dissent and distrust among militant organizations, officials confirm.
At the same time, American diplomats are quietly working behind the scenes with Middle Eastern partners to amplify the speeches and writings of prominent Islamic clerics who are renouncing terrorist violence.
At the local level, the authorities are experimenting with new ways to keep potential terrorists off guard.
In New York City, as many as 100 police officers in squad cars from every precinct converge twice daily at randomly selected times and at randomly selected sites, like Times Square or the financial district, to rehearse their response to a terrorist attack. City police officials say the operations are believed to be a crucial tactic to keep extremists guessing as to when and where a large police presence may materialize at any hour. “What we’ve developed since 9/11, in six or seven years, is a better understanding of the support that is necessary for terrorists, the network which provides that support, whether it’s financial or material or expertise,” said Michael E. Leiter, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
“We’ve now begun to develop more sophisticated thoughts about deterrence looking at each one of those individually,” Mr. Leiter said in an interview. “Terrorists don’t operate in a vacuum.”
In some ways, government officials acknowledge, the effort represents a second-best solution. Their preferred way to combat terrorism remains to capture or kill extremists, and the new emphasis on deterrence in some ways amounts to attaching a new label to old tools.
This is hogwash. The story is supposed to be about deterrence. The story itself refers to "something akin to deterrence." And the examples of what we are doing are not deterrence--they are examples of defense to complicate enemy attack preparations, spoiling operations to disrupt their planning and keep them off balance, and propaganda to undermine the appeal of jihad to angry young Moslem men with few prospects of success in life. This is not deterrence.
Deterrence is the fear that we can retaliate just as hard as an enemy strikes and therefore prevent the start of hostilities or the escalation to a higher level of hostilities:
The act or process of discouraging actions or preventing occurrences by instilling fear or doubt or anxiety.
The Cold War concept of deterrence was mainly about preventing the Soviet Union from attacking us or our allies with nuclear weapons or attacking us conventionally in NATO by threatening to use nukes first on the Soviet invasion forces.
Our jihadi enemies are not subject to deterrence. And if they were, their continuing efforts to kill us and our offensive on all fronts against them makes retaliation kind of a moot concept. We have to kill our jihadi enemies and undermine their appeal for recruits who think they are joining in on the great Islamist victory parade by making the fight obviously deadly on an individual level and futile on the caliphate level. And until we do that we also have to defend against their attacks.
Certainly, non-jihadi despots who might harbor them are certainly subject to deterrence. But despots know that they can survive a barrage of cruise missiles and perhaps emerge with their reputation enhanced for taking on America and winning (surviving). Heck, if they are lucky they can parade some dead civilians and maybe a destroyed baby milk factory.
But if you want to discuss deterring despots, let's discuss the deterrence value of crushing a jihadi state in Afghanistan that harbored al Qaeda as it planned and executed the 9/11 attacks and left them hiding and running from cave to cave and always worried about a smart bomb from above.
If deterrence can work, let's discuss the deterrence value of smashing a state that absorbed those cruise missiles for a decade while defying the world's demands that it disarm and dismantle all its WMD programs and prove it did so. Let's discuss the deterrence value of driving the despot of a prison-state with a UN seat from his many palaces to less luxurious holes in the ground, trying him, and hanging the SOB for his many crimes.
And let's discuss the deterrence value for many Moslem young men of seeing fellow glory seekers who bought the all day pass for Jihadworld in Iraq who believed they could become the new Saladin fail to create the caliphate and simply die for a lost cause.
The Times tries very hard to make passive defense, limited non-conventional operations and small-scale force, and hope seem like a workable strategy by attempting to portray them all as a strategy of deterrence. And they use the word "deter" a lot both themselves and in quotes from officials. But this is not deterrence. It's all about making wars against despots seem unnecessary. This may be true, but if we don't need to wage wars against regimes that seek to harm us, it will be because we smashed two such regimes and ended their glory days as wannabee jihad leaders.
But I doubt we will be that lucky. If deterrence works, why do Syria and Iran wage war on us in Iraq? Sure, for a short time they feared us. But then they resumed their war against us. And why didn't Saddam heed the lesson of Afghanistan in the months prior to our invasion when we were obviously preparing to attack? And why does North Korea continue to proliferate WMD even as they continue their five-decade claim that our invasion of North Korea is imminent?
But hey, even if deterrence doesn't work, smashing two regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq and turning them into allies worked very nicely. And it does seem to have deterred Libya from continuing their nuclear program. So if destroying an offending regime won't deter, how will we adapt the Cold War practice of deterrence against jihadi enemies?
We are not practicing deterrence in our Long War and the article does not demonstrate that we are, apart from relying the strange distortion of the definition of "deterrence" to pretend that is what we are doing. It is good we are not trying deterrence, of course, because deterrence against our enemies is highly over-rated. We won't get out of this war the easy way. We have to kill the jihadis, undermine their society's desire for jihad, and defend ourselves until our enemies are dead and potential enemies disillusioned. Oh, and if we can deter a non-jihadi state from supporting terrorists, that will be fine, too. But don't count on that kind of luck, either.
I'd say the authors are just fooling themselves with their ridiculous piece, but luckily for the Times, their subscribers want to be fooled.
