TIA Daily • August 9 and 10, 2010
FEATURE ARTICLE
Why We Can Win, Part 3
by Robert Tracinski
Editor's Note: The article below is the conclusion of a three-part series—but the first two parts were published a year ago. (Part 3 was pre-empted last August by a little argument we all had over health-care legislation.)The main title of the series is "Why We Can Win." Part 1 and Part 2—follow the links to read them—were published when there was important new evidence of the weakness and collapse of the jihadist creed, particularly in Iran and also to some extent in Pakistan. The situation in Iran has remained unfortunately static since then; the regime has not regained its moral legitimacy or the support of the population, but it has still managed to suppress outright revolution. The situation in Pakistan is static or perhaps a bit worse. At the time, the Pakistani military was actively moving to reverse Taliban gains; now, anticipating an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Pakistani government seems to be hedging its bets and once against contemplating an accommodation with the Taliban.
Part 2 of the series dealt with the part of the topic that was mostly timely then: the fundamental weakness of Islamism that repels decent people and causes the eventual rejection of the Islamist creed wherever it is implemented. The installment below deals with our strengths, the positive values that America has to offer. That is the part of the topic that is most timely now, because it is central to the doctrine of counter-insurgency which is now on trial in Afghanistan.
I intended the article below to be the August 9 edition of TIA Daily, but as I was writing it, it got a little out of control—which sometimes happens. So I'm putting it out as a combined edition for August 9 and 10. I'll get back to covering current news on Wednesday.—RWT
We have now understood the weakness that makes our enemies vulnerable to collapse. But we also need to understand our vital strengths, particularly the positive values we have to offer and which we use to lure away the loyalty of the enemy's population.
If the weakness of our enemies is the contrast between their claims to morality and the vicious brutality of their system, our greatest strength is the actual benevolence of our system, which contrasts to all of the lies told about us in the enemy's propaganda.
We just got a very timely reminder of this, with the latest cover of TIME Magazine. I must warn you that the image is disturbing—but necessary to see. It is the disfigured face of a young Afghan woman whose ears and nose were cut off by the Taliban as a typically brutal punishment for some minor infraction. The accompanying article is a realistic projection of what would happen to the Afghan people—particularly to Afghan women—if America were to abandon the country to Taliban rule.
To publish this photo was a courageous and important choice. The allegedly "progressive" left needs to be warned, beforehand, of the kind of barbarity their policies would unleash—a reality they frantically evaded (both before and after the fact) the last time they urged American retreat, in Southeast Asia. But the point goes beyond a humanitarian appeal to save the women of Afghanistan. It reminds us of a deeper and more important point: the strength we gain through the enormous positive incentives we have to offer the world. It is only through American intervention in Afghanistan, only through the influence there of our political system and philosophy of life, that any kind of human life is possible to the Afghans. That is our strength: that the way of life we offer is not just appealing; it is mankind's only hope, and many Afghans—particularly Afghan women—must realize this fact.
The most interesting part of the TIME story, for our purposes, is this detail: an editorial that explains the cover image assures us that the disfigured young woman "is in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by the NGO Women for Afghan Women. Aisha will head to the US for reconstructive surgery sponsored by the Grossman Burn Foundation, a humanitarian organization in California. We are supporting that effort."
You can tell from the picture that Aisha was a beautiful woman—and I am confident, knowing what Western medicine can accomplish, that she will be again. That implies what the vital next step of this story is, for the publishers of TIME: when Aisha's reconstructive surgery is finished, they must put her on the cover again. Think what the contrast between those two pictures would demonstrate. The Islamists take a beautiful women and turn her into a hideous gargoyle—a symbol of their view of life. Then, through an advanced technology that must seem like a miracle to the rest of the world, we turn her back into a beautiful woman again—a symbol of our view of life.
The sight of a beautiful woman is a symbol of the enjoyment of life here on earth. The Islamists are against beauty, against enjoyment, against life. America is for all of these things. That is all the world really needs to know about the two sides in this conflict.
You can see the same issue in the Taliban's recent slaughter of a Western medical team that traveled to a remote province to provide care to Afghan villagers. Why kill Western doctors? For the same motive that causes them to disfigure a beautiful woman: to kill off any possibility of living a human life. Some years ago, I linked to a dispatch from a reporter embedded with an American unit in Afghanistan, who described how American medics were besieged with pleas for help from villagers who had been living under Taliban rule, with no access to any medical care at all. Summing up the plight of the children, he described it as "a catalog of pediatric suffering." The slaughter of the Western medical team reminds us that this suffering is by design. But it also reminds us that we are the ones with the power to liberate the world from that suffering.
This is not just about medicine or technology. It is true of every aspect of life. Consider the legendary popularity, on the illegal satellite dishes of Iran, of American television shows like "Baywatch," or the stories of young men in Afghanistan having their hair cut in the style of Leonardo DiCaprio from Titanic. (Yes, these popular culture references are about ten years behind the times, but that's modern and up-to-date by the standards of a region still stuck in the seventh century AD.) These aspects of American culture are influential because they represent a way of life in which people are happy, benevolent, and free to enjoy life.
(This, incidentally, is why Dinesh D' Souza's book The Enemy at Home was so viciously evil. In arguing that the "depravity" of American popular culture gives us a bad name in the Muslim world, he is buying into the mythology of the Islamist propagandists—and acting as one of them. But if you live in Tehran or Kandahar, American rappers aren't going to impress you as examples of moral depravity, because you've seen much, much worse. It is what is good about American culture that is going to have a far bigger impact.)
The effect of all of this on the War on Terrorism can be explained by analogy to the Cold War. The Communists collapsed when their claims of material superiority were exposed as false and they lost the loyalty, not just of the people, but even of the elites who were supposed to keep the system in power. But the Soviets weren't just discredited by the permanent poverty and shortages in Communist countries. They were discredited by the sight of prodigious material abundance in capitalist countries. A key step in the conversion of Boris Yeltsin—who would preside over the dismantling of Soviet Communism—was his trip, as part of a delegation of Soviet officials, to an American supermarket. Or remember the great laboratories which showed the effects of capitalism and communism side by side: West Berlin and East Berlin, or Hong Kong and mainland China.
Consider how demoralizing this is to anyone who has accepted the Communist world view. Not only is Communism failing to deliver on its claims of plenty for the masses—but the evil capitalists, who are supposed to be oppressing the poor, are achieving that promise of abundance beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
The problem of the Islamists is similar, but in a different realm. Their claim is not to material superiority but to spiritual superiority. And here again, the problem for the Islamists isn't just that they deliver sadism where they promise virtue. It's the fact that anyone with access to information about the West can see the moral superiority of our way of life.
Think of it this way. Every religion promises an eventual reward, in an otherworldly paradise, for those who are faithful to its creed—while threatening unbelievers with an eventual punishment, a hell. But what if those who believe this creed begin to realize that heaven and hell already exist and have been reversed? What if they see that it is the devout believers who live in a hell on earth—while the infidels live in an earthly paradise?
Those of us who live in the free, prosperous countries of the West do live in paradise, certainly by comparison to the dictatorships of the Middle East. And that indicates to us the long-term strategy for defeating Islamism: lure more and more of the world's Muslims into the paradise of the infidels.
This is, after all, how we converted the Japanese and the Germans after World War II—not just by destroying them in war, but also by being benevolent occupiers and offering them a system and way of life which showered them with spiritual and material benefits.
This is a process that is just as powerful as bombs and rockets in defeating our enemies. In the long run, it is far more powerful. War is only the short-term mechanism which is necessary to allow this long-term process to work.
That brings us to the current context of counter-insurgency war, because this is a form of warfare in which the short term necessity—killing the enemy in combat—is intertwined with our long-term goal: using the positive benefits of our way of life to take away the enemy's base of support in the general population by luring them over to our side.
That's all that counter-insurgency really amount to. The only thing complicated about counter-insurgency is the context in which it arises. The war in Afghanistan is not like the war against Japan. We don't fight the shooting war, then administer a peaceful occupation. Because our enemy was too weak to mount a serious conventional military resistance but too fanatical to give up, we now have to fight the shooting war and administer the occupation at the same time.
The basic idea of counter-insurgency doctrine is that you don't just kill the insurgents; you cut off their base of support in the population by bringing the people the positive values that are to be gained by accepting the occupation.
Of course, this all has to go hand in hand with the shooting war, and even that can add to the sense, among the insurgents and their supporters, that the rewards and punishments promised by their religion have been reversed. Allah is a god of war who promises his devotees victory in battle, but those who encounter American troops realize that we are the real war gods. So part of the story of our counter-insurgency victory in Iraq was how impressed the Iraqis were with the courage, toughness, and efficacy of American troops. Some of the better military reporters, like Michael Yon and Bing West, mentioned the impact this had on the Iraqis and the way in which Iraqi troops looked up to and sought to emulate American soldiers.
There has been a lot of complicated mumbo-jumbo written about counter-insurgency, and General Petraeus famously expressed that doctrine in a series of "paradoxes." But really it's a straightforward proposition, summed up in an old Marine Corps motto: "No better friend, no worse enemy." The message sent by a proper counter-insurgency strategy is: life will be short and unpleasant if you fight us, but long and happy if you join us. Or in the context of this discussion, we can sum it up as: "Give 'em Hell and offer them Heaven."
Both sides of this equation are essential to breaking the enemy's will to fight. In contrast to the squishy liberals, you can't subdue the enemy with elaborate shows of "respect" and promises of foreign aid. You need to shoot a lot of the bad guys first, until everyone figures out that the Islamists are not going to win, ever. As they say, you get farther with a kind word and gun than you do with just a kind word. But in contrast to the anti-counter-insurgency conservatives, you also need to have positive incentives to offer, because the way you win an insurgency is to hand off the war to local allies who believe they will have a good future if they side with you.
This is why I've been warning against a strain of defeatism on the right which was suppressed under the Bush administration but is growing now that Obama is the commander-in-chief. (For an example, see here, though the author dishonestly refers to all advocates of the Forward Strategy of Freedom as "neoconservatives" and "Wilsonians"—while referring to his own libertarian-pacifist view as "Jeffersonian.") This variant of defeatism is opposed to the war in Afghanistan because it believes that counter-insurgency, "democracy promotion," and "nation building" are futile. These anti-counter-insurgency defeatists (if you will accept that overly compounded term) don't believe that these things are being done badly; they believe that they shouldn't be done at all.
For conservatives, this comes from a kind of cultural defeatism. These conservatives take seriously the idea that culture and values are utterly determined by tradition, so that the culture of other regions of the world cannot really be changed or improved. For some Objectivists, I suspect this anti-counter-insurgency bias also comes from an implicit acceptance of the altruist caricature of selfishness as a zero-sum game, so that if we're pursuing a war policy that benefits others, including efforts to avoid civilian casualties, then we must be sacrificing our own interests.
This anti-counter-insurgency defeatism underestimates our enemy's permanent and profound weakness, and it also underestimates our own spiritual strength, the profound and universal appeal of the positive values we have to offer. In effect, it tells us to fight without using our most powerful weapon—the only weapon we have that will transform the world in the long term.
What we have to offer is not exactly paradise—we can't bring people in Iraq or Afghanistan all of the way from a semi-primitive existence to First World opulence. But the idea is to help them achieve some aspect of our paradise. This connects to my idea about the "metaphysics of normal life." We can establish some element of a decent society—such as the absence of everyday government corruption, or an absence of pervasive physical fear—all of which is not "normal," historically and statistically, but which we take for granted as normal here in the West.
By the standards of most of history and much of the world, we live in an earthly paradise, and a crucial part of how we can win against Islamic fanaticism is by enticing more of the world to join us here in the paradise of the infidels.
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