War's Unintended Consequences

WASHINGTON -- It is a sign of the times that Barack Obama made his first two presidential campaign stops abroad in recent days to the two active theaters of war, where 180,000 American troops have been engaged in fighting for nearly the past six years. It would be useful to ask the right questions about these wars, now that a new leadership will take office in Washington. One good place to start is to learn the right lessons from the conduct and consequences of these wars, so that any mistakes here are not repeated elsewhere in the future.

Watching Obama in Afghanistan and Iraq, as I did from Washington, it seemed to be mostly a domestic electoral event, and understandably so. From the start, the center of gravity of these two wars has always been firmly in the United States. The wars were launched after September 11, 2001, to stop terrorists from attacking Americans. The justification for war may have been reasonable. Almost everything else about these wars has not.

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, strengthening dictatorial regimes, expanding lawless territories, weakening the rule of law, attracting new cohorts of Salafist terrorists, or fomenting a greater reliance on narcotics and warlordism as the organizing orders of large segments of society.

It now seems clear that war -- at least these two wars -- generates the additional threat of increased Salafist terrorism, according to an important and ongoing study by an American scholar. 

Stephanie Kaplan's PhD research at MIT has explored the linkages between war and terrorism, from the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s to the present 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, DC, where we are both serving as visiting fellows and writing texts. What she had to say was enlightening, and should be heard by all Americans who care about how their leaders conduct foreign policy, including foreign wars.

Starting 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 made it so, now five years on, she wanted to explore a critical question for scholars and policymakers alike: Has the Iraq War increased or decreased the jihadist terrorist threat?

She notes that American, European and other officials sometimes offer contradictory assessments of this matter, suggesting both that Iraq is a main driver of global terrorism or that blowback from Iraq is overstated. Assumptions prevail, she says, because empirical data and reliable research on the matter are in short supply. She touched on these issues in a brief article published in the spring 2008 issue of précis, the newsletter of the MIT Center for International Studies. Among the key points she makes:

1. We cannot assume the blowback from the Iraq war will exactly mirror the Afghanistan war. The quality and quantity of combat experience in Iraq are very different from the Afghan precedent, and many more jihadis went to fight in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

2. The Iraq war poses a threat in part through the linkages it has with other centers of jihadist activity, and by its generating and transferring capabilities (bomb-making and suicide bombers, for example) to other conflict zones (Algeria, or European cities where attacks have been launched). Counting the number of attacks globally is not a good measure of how the Iraq war impacts on terror threats elsewhere, because quantitative data alone cannot adequately measure Iraq's impact on global jihadist movements.

3. "Victory" in Iraq will not necessarily erase the years of damage caused by the war. "That damage," she says, "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 mujahedeen 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 war zone 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 draws from her study to date provide timely material for concerned Americans -- including presidential candidates -- to read during their trips to active wars around the world.

She concludes: "Arriving at sound judgments about the unintended consequences of the Iraq War is the first step toward reversing the conflict's unfortunate terrorism legacy."