The proverbial hammer

Today greeted me with two contradictory headlines.  Fareed Zakaria urged a beginning to the end of the war on terror.  The Wall Street Journal reports an expansion of U.S. military authority to intervene in Mali and other parts of the Sahel against extremists, using drones and special ops teams, as we do in Yemen and Pakistan.

Fareed does not argue that the threat no longer exists, only that it can be dealt with in the normal legal framework rather than the extraordinary one put in place after 9/11.  Nor, I imagine, will the Pentagon ignore completely the non-military aspects of the fight against al Qaeda linked groups in Mali.  Our military officers are far too smart, and far too deeply committed to counter-insurgency, to ignore the social, economic and political matrix that is providing safe haven to extremists in northern Mali.

But the fact is that we are still over-emphasizing military responses to terrorism, rather than using preventive  and civilian approaches before the emergence of a clear threat.  Northern Mali, Tuareg grievances and various extremist groups existed well before this year.  Why were we ignoring them when it might have been cheaper and easier to prevent them from emerging in the first place?

We are still playing global whack-a-mole with terrorists rather than developing a strategy that makes them unwelcome in the poverty-stricken, relatively weak and conflict-prone states in which they find safe haven.  If  we are successful in Mali, they will no doubt find have someplace else.  Strengthening the indigenous capacity to resist and repress extremists is much more likely to produce results.  It is also likely to be far cheaper.  But it requires a more forward-looking, anticipatory and civilian-based strategy.

Instead, we are now deploying an additional Defense Intelligence agents abroad.  They will number 1600 in five years time.  This makes no sense, unless they will be doing intelligence collection that would be better done by civilians agencies.

If al Qaeda central still exists, someone there is surely calculating today where to move to when Mali gets too hot.  Northern Nigeria?  Niger?  Back to Somalia?  There are lots of options.  What we need is a comprehensive strategy that enables a preventive approach to strengthening local governance.  The military may recognize that as the requirement, but it is not their responsibility to meet it.  Our civilians–State Department and USAID as well as Justice and Commerce departments–need the resources and capabilities to undertaken expeditionary activities that today are possible only for the Defense Department.

We are the proverbial hammer that views everything as a nail.  Some jobs require a screwdriver.