I have suggested in previous columns that the al-Qaida model of Fourth Generation war may be failing for inherent reasons -- that is to say, for reasons it cannot fix.
"Tom Ricks' Inbox" in the Oct. 19 Washington Post offers some confirmation of that assessment. Ricks writes: "Where did al-Qaida in Iraq go wrong? In a paper prepared for the recent annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the Australian political scientist Andrew Phillips argues persuasively that, by their nature, al-Qaida affiliates tend to alienate their hosts ... ."
Ricks then quotes Phillips at some length: "In successive conflicts ranging from Bosnia to Chechnya to Kashmir, the jihad jet-set has rapidly worn out its welcome among local host populations as a result of its ideological inflexibility and high-handedness, as well as its readiness to resort to indiscriminate violence against locals at the first signs of challenge. ... That this pattern has so frequently been repeated suggests that the underlying causes of al-Qaida's defeat in Iraq may transcend the specific circumstances of that conflict. Baldly stated, the causes of al-Qaida's defeat in Iraq can be located in its ideological DNA."
Right off the bat you know this is bullshit since it talks about "fourth generation warfare." As far as I can tell, this high concept term is just a bunch of guerrillas with a web site. You may recall the Zapatistas in Mexico in the 1990s. They were 4th generation warrior darlings of the media, with their Commander Zero causing journalists of the day to feel a tingle up their legs. You'll also recall that the Zapatistas do not today control Mexico. Western analysts read all kinds of deep thinking into thugs with cell phones and lap tops, That's all this is.
But I digress.
The point I really want to make is that while al Qaeda's evil may be an underlying cause of their defeat, we still actually had to defeat them. For even though people learn to hate al Qaeda jihadis and their extremism, those same people learn to fear them as well. They both hate the jihadis for their extremism and fear their terror. The terror got the al Qaeda thugs submission and obedience even though the ideology got them hated.
Without an external force that gives the locals living under the tender mercies of the jihadis some hope that they can successfully resists the jihadis, that underlying cause of the jihadis' defeat cannot be exploited. Just as Turkey was the "sick man of Europe" for centuries because nobody toppled them and were in fact bolstered by Europe to keep a vacuum from forming in Turkish territory, modern jihadis will stand intact unless they are crushed.
That's where we came in. We broke the jihadis in Afghansitan and then in Iraq. We exploited the fact that the sick ideology of the jihadis made themselves hated. But that hatred of the jihadis alone without our power to help the locals resist was insufficient to defeat the jihadis.
Don't buy the idea that the jihadis defeated themselves. We've heard the same rationalizaiton by our Left about the collapse of the Soviet Union having nothing to do with American resistance to communism.
