How the fighting impacted the countries or their surrounding region has always been something of an afterthought or a footnote for most Americans. The multiple, mostly negative, impact of these wars on their immediate neighborhoods has been significant in many cases, in many ways: refugee flows, economic waste, the strengthening of dictatorial regimes, the expansion of lawless territories, the weakening of the rule of law, the attraction of Salafist terrorists, the greater reliance on narcotics and warlordism as the organizing orders of large segments of society.
With respect to the additional threat of increased Salafist terrorism, scholar Stephanie Kaplan has been pursuing important doctoral research at MIT exploring the linkages between war and terrorism, from the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had a chance to chat with her a few days ago at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, where we are both serving as visiting fellows. What she had to say was enlightening and should be grasped by more Americans who care about how their leaders conduct foreign policy, including foreign wars.
Kaplan started from the premise that Iraq had never been a major front in the "global war on terror" before the US-led invasion in March 2003. She wanted to explore a critical question for scholars and policymakers alike: Has Iraq increased or decreased the jihadist terrorist threat?
She noted that American, European and other officials sometimes offered contradictory assessments of this matter. Much was assumption, she observed, because empirical data and reliable research on the matter were in short supply. She touched on these issues in a brief article published in the spring 2008 issue of the newsletter of the MIT Center for International Studies. Among the key points she made was that we could not assume the blowback from the Iraq war would exactly mirror the Afghanistan war. The quality and quantity of combat experience in Iraq were very different from the Afghan precedent during the 1980s, and many more jihadists went to fight in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
She also noted that the Iraq war posed a threat in part through the linkages it had with other centers of jihadist activity, and by generating and transferring capabilities (bomb-making technique, suicide bombers, etc) to other conflict zones (Algeria or European cities where attacks have been launched). Counting the number of attacks globally was not a good measure of how the Iraq war impacted on terror threats elsewhere, because quantitative data alone could not adequately measure Iraq's impact on global jihadist movements.
Kaplan also concluded that "victory" in Iraq would not necessarily erase the years of damage caused by the war. "That damage," she said, "will take the form of additional jihadist capabilities generated on and off the battlefield. As an episode of organized violence, wars simulate the terrorist experience and prepare the surviving mujahideen for a lifetime of post-war terrorist activity ... Wars train a new cadre of battle-hardened fighters and leaders who return from the frontlines armed with a rolodex full of the most violent contacts on the planet. And wars serve as a magnet for money and weapons that can be deployed in the warzone and beyond. If the Iraq conflict creates more jihadist resources than it destroys, then the defeat of Al-Qaeda in Iraq will be tantamount to winning one of many battles but losing ground in the war against Islamist extremism."
These initial lessons that Kaplan drew from her study to date have provided timely material for concerned Americans - including presidential candidates - to read during their trips to active war theaters around the world. Kaplan concluded: "Arriving at sound judgments about the unintended consequences of the Iraq war is the first step toward reversing the conflict's unfortunate terrorism legacy."
*Published in Lebanon's DAILY STAR on July 23, 2008. |
