How to define success in the war on terror

So asked a senior federal law-enforcement official at a recent meeting I attended in Washington, D.C. The context was the war on terrorism.

This was not a rhetorical question. The official was mulling over how to measure success in the counter-terror war. He seemed uncertain and appeared to be seeking an answer for himself.

What he did know, however, was that whatever success may be in such a war, domestic law enforcement — by itself, in any case — was not enough.

One significant difficulty is that the culture of law enforcement does not lend itself neatly to dealing with strategic-intelligence issues. Long having been rewarded for "cracking" individual cases and presenting glossy press conferences, law enforcement has been confounded by a murky environment in which to "catch them in the act" is not only extraordinarily difficult, but can also represent a fatally late failure.

To deter terrorists from launching attacks is better than catching them in the act, but as the official asked, "How do we know whether what we do has a deterrence effect?" In other words, how do we know if our homeland-security measures actually deterred attacks — for there have been none since 9/11 — or have the terrorists merely been waiting and preparing for the "right moment" to strike again?

In the absence of hard, measurable data, the official considered the effects of our protective efforts to be marginal at best — psychologically reassuring to the public at large, perhaps, but not particularly central to the core issue of combating terrorists.

So preemption has been offered as the more-effective solution. Since passive, defensive measures alone cannot possibly protect against every single terrorist attack, taking the fight to the terrorists before they can carry out their plans has become more attractive and acceptable.

But even preemption has limits. Preemption can take a long time, requires considerable military-economic resources and is often politically very divisive both inside and outside the United States. Even when the right conditions are met, we cannot pursue every terrorist cell, sanctuary and state sponsor without exhausting our vast, but ultimately limited, resources. Whereas homeland security offers a short-term measure, preemption serves, at best, as a medium-term response to terrorism.

What then is the long-term answer? What is success?

The first thing we must keep in mind is that this war is not about fighting terrorism. Terrorism, as many others have pointed out, is merely a method of warfare, albeit an abhorrent one. Nor are fighting and killing terrorists adequate in the long run. Even if we kill every single terrorist alive today, so long as the original motivation that led to terrorism persists, there will be more terrorist violence in the future.

The fundamental issue, then, is one of ideology. When Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History and the Last Man," he proclaimed the victory of democratic capitalism over totalitarianism such as fascism and communism. Considering the emergence of many regional-tribal wars and 9/11 since then, many think Fukuyama was wrong.

As economist Richard Rahn pointed out, "Fukuyama was not wrong. He was premature." The problem of extremist Islamic terrorism is the problem of the broader Middle East, the failure to establish a prevailing pluralistic ideology.

Before the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the two dominant governing ideologies in the Middle East were corrupt monarchism (Saudi Arabia and Iran) and repressive, socialist dictatorships (Iraq and Syria). Given the absence of any attractive ideology in the region, the appeal of religious purism harnessed to extremism turned out to be irresistible to the many disaffected, including those from privileged backgrounds.

Thus, success — or failure — in this war will not depend on whether we can conduct better passenger searches or kill terrorist bands. It will depend on whether we can help to establish a competing ideology — of democratic capitalism with Islamic characteristics — in the Middle East. That is why the upcoming January elections in Iraq are so singularly important.

If we are able to help Iraqis — situated in the heart of the Middle East and bordering six major Islamic societies — to establish a synthesis of Western democratic capitalism and Islamic traditions, such an ideology will prove to be even more irresistible than religious purism-turned-extremist.

On the other hand, if we are unsuccessful in this endeavor or recoil from it, we will have to live with a continuing cycle of intrusive homeland-security measures and costly preemptive conflicts — a war without an end.

James J. Na is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle (www.discovery.org) and runs the "Guns and Butter Blog" (gunsandbutter.blogspot.com). He can be reached at jamesjna@hotmail.com