We often hear the war against the Enemy described as asymmetrical warfare. By this we usually mean that jihadists do not have the capability to fight what we consider a conventional battle. But there is another way of looking at symmetry. The jihadists fight us on several fronts:
Nation-States: Iran is the chief example of a state enemy. There are others. Still more are potential Enemy states. Many are only a coup or an assassination away from falling into the Enemy.
Non-state actors: Al-Qaeda is the most famous but there are many others all around the globe. You know who they are, from the Philippines to London, from Sweden to South Africa. Some like Hamas are in the process of taking over something that is Not-Quite-a-State. Thus one Enemy front becomes another.
Leaderless Cells / Lone Wolves: From the London bombers to the guy who shot the El Al counter at LAX to that student in North Carolina. They're always described by neighbors after the attack as "nice chaps" and "quiet boys" who were normal, liked football, studied hard. The Enemy is among us, waiting.
Demography: the Enemy grows. In the West and in other "infidel" lands and in its homelands, the Enemy fight with her womb. Each generation more than the one before. The Enemy threatens us with its numbers.
Each of these fronts feeds into another. The Enemy States fund and supply the Non-State Actors who generate the methods and ideology for the Leaderless Cells which get their manpower from the growing Enemy demographics. The Enemy fights us with at least four interlocking, self-reinforcing fronts.
Ask yourself how we fight against all this and you will probably come up with only one answer: the State. The West uses only State-based resources to combat the Enemy, from the military and security services to financial embargoes and diplomatic "pressure". The West does not threaten Islam with its high birth rate. The West doesn't unleash waves of terrorists or fund underground militant groups.
All we have is the State. We treat the Enemy as a military force to be defeated, as an underground terror group to be hunted down, as leaderless cells or lone wolves to be punished after the fact. As a rising demographic group to be co-opted, appeased or ignored.
But no matter how you look at it, the West still only has one front against the Enemy - the State. This is asymmetry. The West does not have terror groups training militants to bomb and kill. The West doesn't have leaderless cells of Christians or Libertarians or cartoonists in Tehran plotting to kill the president or ordinary people. Multiculturalists are not doubling their numbers every two generations, expanding into other lands, demanding accommodation and assistance, changing the societies they enter. The West doesn't even send missionaries in any real numbers. The West sends diplomats and businessmen, not all of whom are on our side.
Can we continue to fight like this? Can the State, with all its limitations and restrictions defeat an Enemy that comes at us from so many different directions, at so many different speeds, with so many different weapons? What can a Stealth Fighter do against terror cells in Hamburg? How can diplomats fight assassins in Virginia? How can we expect spies to combat demography?
4 comments:
My great and distant relative, William Walker, not the greatest guy in history perhaps, or even obviously, still had the right idea: Filibuster. It's a Durch word. It probably doesn't mean what you think it does. It's our successful future.
"They're always described by neighbors after the attack as "nice chaps" and "quiet boys" who were normal, liked football, studied hard. The Enemy is among us, waiting."
This is known as 'Sudden Jihad Syndrome', where a 'normal' Muslim suddenly flips into a killing-machine.
The enemy used to fight with traditional overt state-controlled military means. But after losing several wars with tiny Israel they decided to resort to covert means. At first these were state-sponsored but they are increasingly becoming ideological splinter groups using covert means to inflict damage.
There are past examples of ideological groups using covert violent means. Communists not associated with Moscow resorted to these methods in the US (Weatherman) and Europe (Baader-Meinhoff). Today we have eco-terrorists who currently target property only.
We can go back several centuries and consider savage Indian attacks on frontier towns. Or go back even further and consider the perennial barbarian attacks on the border of the Roman Empire that lasted 500-1000 years. In both these cases, counter-attacks not only killed the combatants but often decimated the populations of barbarian tribes. New migration of barbarians became the next threat for Rome (such as the Huns.) Only when the Western Roman Empire weakened internally was it not able to withstand such attacks.
At present we still can deal with the state-sponsors by modifying the traditional criteria of 'imminent threat of attack' to 'ongoing support of terror.' Thus, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, all support ongoing covert terror groups. At some point we may have to change our method of attack again. Perhaps we’ll need to reassess past methodologies dealing with the barbarian threat to civilization of our ancestors. Or perhaps nations-building will change their cultures so that we won’t have to do that.
This seems to be one of the earliest recorded cases of SJS on the internet
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/003071.php
though it wasn't recognised as such at the time (if you google for Sudden Jihad Syndrome nowadays you'll find dozens of references).
In retrospect, I wouldn't be at all surprised if going back through the criminal records of Muslim areas of Europe and the US, you would find more of the same.
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