The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  As things stand, we can’t have a serious debate about the global war, because our own government won’t let the facts reach the American people. The story of the bin Laden documents is just one of many. Some of the information is classified, and properly so, although the current investigation into alleged suppression of intelligence from Afghanistan suggests that politics can trump technical requirements. If Joscelyn and Hayes are right, this is what took place regarding the squelching of the full al Qaeda story. I believe that even—maybe even especially—unhappy stories should be told. I think the American people, who are now called upon to make some terribly important electoral decisions, should have the full picture. For the most part, they are capable of understanding the realities of war, and why even the best military in the history of the world is bound to fail on occasion. In the coming years we’re going to have to fight several very tough enemies, and we’ll likely lose some of those battles.

  Another dramatic example of this Radical Islamic expansion came in the fall of 2007. We witnessed al Qaeda training significant numbers of fighters inside Somalia. Through good intel collection, we watched two separate camps over a six-month period, training approximately 150 terrorists per camp. They had family members at the camp so we were restricted from destroying them, even though we watched their physical fitness training, religious training, and, in one case, their graduation ceremonies. At least a third of the approximately three hundred graduates were white Europeans and a couple of them came from the United States. One of the U.S. trainees actually conducted the first known suicide attack by an American, targeting U.S. forces near a military base in Djibouti.

  These fighters weren’t part of the local fighting. They were destined for foreign operations. Some in this group of three hundred likely returned to Europe, to the battlefields of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world, some likely to Yemen.

  Bottom line: al Qaeda got away with it. We allowed them to train their terrorists without destroying these camps. Why? Because of our high legal and moral standards in the rules of engagement. There were family members at these camps, there were “blinks” in our intelligence collection system (we could not get the requisite overhead support, whether satellites, drones, or aircraft, dedicated to this target area). It was all very frustrating. The war in Iraq was raging, things in Afghanistan weren’t going very well, and so we weren’t as effective as we should have been. Al Qaeda’s command and control was eluding us everywhere.

  The situation in Iraq was unquestionably part of the reason we couldn’t get the detailed information we wanted. The support simply was not available. That’s the way life is, quite often. We were losing, General Petraeus was just kicking off his new Surge strategy, and violence levels in Iraq were the highest they had ever been. We needed to show success, and destroying a handful of al Qaeda trainers in a remote corner of the world wasn’t important enough.

  It still makes me seethe, but this is what al Qaeda does so well. They recruit, find our weaknesses, and exploit them. They used an obscure location in the middle of nowhere in Somalia and trained three hundred operatives for external operations. My sense is that some of those terrorists are out in the world today as sleeper agents, or they are in leadership roles in the various theaters of operation where we currently see Radical Islamists fighting.

  If the evidence we have about al Qaeda and other Radical Islamic terror organizations were presented publicly and forcefully, it would be easier for the American people to understand the nature of the war waged against us.

  As Joscelyn and Hayes put it,

  Making the documents public is long overdue. The information in them is directly relevant to many of the challenges we face today—from a nuclear deal with an Iranian regime that supports al Qaeda to the rise of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; from confidence-building measures meant to please the Afghan Taliban to the trustworthiness of senior Pakistani officials.

  Choosing ignorance shouldn’t be an option.

  The people would see that we are being attacked by a potent combination of countries and movements. A lot of people miss the key point that the terrorists are strong at least in part because they are getting help from the military and intelligence services of hostile countries. To be sure, the links between the terrorists and the sponsoring countries are sometimes complicated, and just as individual terrorists will cooperate with us for a while and then go back to their anti-American ways, so terrorist organizations will change their allegiance when it seems to their advantage.

  People need to grasp that Radical Islam is not primarily about religion—it is about politics. Sharia is the basic legal system derived from the religious precepts of Islam, mainly the Koran and the hadiths (supposedly verbatim quotes of what the Prophet Muhammad said during his life). In its strictest definition, Sharia is considered the infallible law of God. They want to impose a worldwide system based on their version of Sharia law that denies freedoms of conscience, choices, and liberties. Basic freedoms! When one starts messing with freedom of conscience, one is not only violating the U.S. Constitution, but also denying a universal human right. I firmly believe that Radical Islam is a tribal cult and must be crushed. Critics get buried in the details of sunna, hadiths, the umma, and the musings of countless Muslim clerics and imams. These so-called Islamic scholars keep their message so complicated so as to create chaos, to confuse in order to control. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mussolini were more transparent. Sharia is a violent law that is buried in barbaric convictions.

  Perhaps the scariest part about this to a man who grew up in tiny Rhode Island is that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) now says if we criticize the Prophet or Islam, we can be charged with blasphemy. That is like saying as a Roman Catholic (and a St. Mary’s School–educated Catholic at that), I cannot criticize the priests who rape and the cardinals and bishops who cover it up!

  In a way, we are dealing with the same issues in Islam under Sharia law. The difference is that the Catholics in the United States did not want to apply canon law to the rest of society (although they tried to do this in select cases). Our legal leaders won by arguing that these were secular crimes in a secular world and canon law has no place in the legal process. Muslims want to apply Sharia law by using our own legal system to strengthen what many Americans believe to be a violent religious law that has no place in the United States.

  Let us not fear what we know to be true. Let us accept what we were founded upon, a Judeo-Christian ideology built on a moral set of rules and laws. Let us not fear, but instead fight those who want to impose Sharia law and their Radical Islamist views.

  4

  How to Win

  What does “winning” mean and how do we accomplish this against Radical Islamists and their allies? It means several things:

  • Destroying the jihadi armies, and killing or capturing their leaders;

  • Discrediting their ideology, which will be greatly helped by our military victories, but which requires a serious program all its own;

  • Creating a new set of twenty-first-century global alliances. This, too, will emerge naturally from the military and political campaign;

  • Bringing a direct challenge to the regimes that support our enemies, weakening them at a minimum, bringing them down whenever possible.

  It won’t be easy—they’re a formidable enemy—and it certainly won’t be fast. Indeed, it is impossible with our current leaders, who clearly lack the will and the desire to win.

  On the other hand, we know how to win this war. We’ve done it before, notably in the Second World War and then the Cold War against the messianic mass movements of the twentieth century, Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. Even in the Middle East since 9/11, we’ve won many battles. In fact, no matter what you’ve been told about the “lost wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve defeated the Radical Islamists every time we’ve fought them seriously. Their current positions of strength were not won a
gainst us on the battlefield, but were instead the result of our bad, politically motivated decisions to withdraw before victory was consolidated.

  The primary requirement for winning any war is the willingness, determination, and resolve to win and to do the necessary things required for victory. At the moment we have a president who said—incredibly, in my opinion—on November 16, 2015: “What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of ‘American leadership’ or ‘America winning.’”

  That says to the American people and to our enemies that America will not lead, does not want to win, and is therefore doomed to lose. Our enemies are certainly determined to lead and to win, whether they are radical Muslims or ambitious secular tyrants.

  There is no escape from this war. Our enemies will not permit that. We will either win or lose, and at present we look like losers. Knowing that the current administration will not challenge them, our enemies will press hard to gain every possible advantage before a new president, potentially with the will to win, takes office.

  You can see this in Afghanistan. U.S. forces led raids against two huge training facilities in the country’s south in October 2015. One of these camps was approximately thirty square miles in size! General John F. Campbell, who oversaw the war effort in Afghanistan between 2014 and 2015, explained that the camp was run by al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and is “probably the largest training camp–type facility that we have seen in 14 years of war.” Unbelievable! But sadly, this is not surprising to those of us who have been intimately following this enemy and take them deadly seriously.

  AQIS is an important component of al Qaeda; it answers to Ayman al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian), bin Laden’s successor. The existence of such an enormous terrorist training facility shows that the terrorists are growing rapidly; it also shows that our intelligence is failing again. AQIS was established in September 2014, and is exporting terrorism throughout the region. The group has claimed attacks in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and al Qaeda is still allied with Pakistan’s many jihadi groups, which frequently carry out operations, especially in the northern part of Pakistan.

  Think about that: U.S. officials discovered what is probably the largest al Qaeda training camp since 2001. Al Qaeda hasn’t been neutralized in Afghanistan. In fact, numerous al Qaeda leaders have relocated into that country.

  A few weeks after this training camp was discovered, the Taliban struck a devastating blow just outside our major base at Bagram, where a suicide terrorist on a motorcycle blew himself up, killing six American troops in the deadliest attack in eighteen months (www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/21/worst-attack-in-18-months-shocks-u-s-military.html?via=desktop&source=twitter).

  We were late noticing a huge al Qaeda base, and we were caught by surprise—the worst such attack in a year and a half—by the Taliban. Yet the administration assures us that we’re doing well. Eventually we will elect leaders who tell the truth, who want to win, and are able to lead. When these leaders are elected, how should they proceed?

  I offer the following four strategic objectives:

  • First, we have to energize every element of national power in a cohesive synchronized manner—similar to the effort during World War II or the Cold War—to effectively resource what will likely be a multigenerational struggle. One leader must be in charge overall and accountable to the president—if this leader does not meet the test, which is to win, then fire him or her and find another who can. We have to stop participating in this never-ending conflict and win! And we must accept that there is no cheap way to win this fight. The bottom line is that we have to organize ourselves first before we can expect any international coalition to seriously join forces with us to destroy this evil we must clearly define as Radical Islamism.

  • Second, we must engage the violent Islamists wherever they are, drive them from their safe havens, and kill them or capture them. There can be no quarter and no accommodation. Any nation-state that offers safe haven to our enemies must be given one choice—to eliminate them or be prepared for those contributing nations involved in this endeavor to do so. We do need to recognize there are nations who lack the capability to defeat this threat and will likely require help to do so inside their own internationally recognized boundaries. We must be prepared to assist those nations.

  • Third, we must decisively confront the state and nonstate supporters and enablers of this violent Islamist ideology and compel them to end their support to our enemies or be prepared to remove their capacity to do so. Many of these are currently considered “partners” of the United States. This must change. If our so-called partners do not act in accordance with internationally accepted norms and behaviors or international law, the United States must be prepared to cut off or severely curtail economic, military, and diplomatic ties. One very precise point on this latter issue. We tend to blame the Saudis and other Arab nations for directly funding the Islamic State and other radical Islamist groups. We must either stop this blame game or we must provide direct and unequivocal evidence to the leaders of these nations and offer them one choice (and one choice only): arrest these individuals and stop this funding or face severe consequences. And we must be prepared to back this up. Blaming others for our own inadequacy does not signal to our enemies, and more important to our friends, our complete and total commitment to winning this war against Radical Islamism.

  • Fourth, we must wage ideological war against Radical Islam and its supporters. If we can’t tackle enemy doctrines that call for our domination or extinction, we aren’t going to destroy their jihadis. I’ll start with that one, because it underlies our national willingness to do the others.

  We’ve fought radical ideologies in the past and won. Had we lost to the Nazis in World War II, much of the world would be praying at the altar of Adolf Hitler. Omar al-Baghdadi, or whoever leads the Islamic State, and his ilk of radical ideological thugs cannot be allowed to exist in a globalized world that seeks to expand humanity’s potential. They want to destroy it.

  Waging Ideological War Against Radical Islam

  In the last century, we defeated enemies who combined totalitarian ideology with the power of major nation-states. The Axis powers in the Second World War believed their vision of the world, their peoples, and their political doctrines were superior to ours, and they were confident they would overwhelm us. The Nazis’ doctrine rested on the conviction that the Aryan race was superior to all others, and consequently a “bastardized” society like ours was unable to resist their unity and intrinsic racial superiority. The Fascists believed they had identified a superior ruling class, composed of those who had performed heroically in the trenches of the First World War and then led the march on Rome in 1922. The Japanese believed their leaders, starting with the emperor, had divine support and were destined to rule the Pacific region.

  In the Cold War, we defeated the Soviet Empire and its attendant international Communist movement without a major world war. Both the empire and the movement were inspired by the conviction that they had deciphered the laws of history and that those laws, codified in the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism, guaranteed the success of Communism—led by Moscow—everywhere. When Nikita Khrushchev pounded his desk at the United Nations, or, his shoe at the Polish embassy in Moscow, and threatened to “bury” us he wasn’t bragging about the strength of his empire; he was simply and dramatically giving voice (or, in this case, foot) to the core conviction of Communists everywhere.

  In each of these wars (World War II and the Cold War), we took it for granted that we had to challenge the enemies’ ideology. How could it be otherwise? The wars unleashed against us were waged in the name of our enemies’ doctrines, just like jihad today, and both our enemies and we saw the wars as what they were: conflicts of and between civilizations. In the Second World War we constantly warned the American people about the dangers of Nazi and Fascist ideology, critical editions of Mein Kampf were published, and speeches by Hitler and Mussolini received outraged pub
licity. Overseas, our Office of Strategic Services (OSS) waged ideological warfare against the enemy, broadcasting to resistance movements and denouncing numerous and brutal regime crimes, mostly against the European Jewish community. In the Cold War, anti-Communism was commonplace, from the academic establishment to the halls of Congress. The Central Intelligence Agency organized groups such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom that contested Soviet practice and dogma in America and around the world.

  These were serious initiatives that engaged some of the finest minds in the United States. Above all, the campaign against our enemies flowed from the highest levels of the government, starting with the president. These ideological challenges had important consequences. Indeed, they were among the primary reasons for winning the Second World War and the fall of the Soviet Empire.

  When most people talk about “war,” they think of tanks driving across the desert, planes dropping bombs, ships clashing at sea, and soldiers going toe-to-toe against each other. But at least as important, people need to recognize the strategic power of words and pictures. Our enemies certainly do; they recruit followers and inspire terrorists using words via social media on forums such as Facebook and Twitter, sending their messages of hate across the Internet, which they also use to communicate with their legions of followers, including sleepers in our country. Ideas, and the words that express them, are very much a part of war, but we have deliberately deprived ourselves of using them.

  United States citizens and, frankly, citizens of other Western nations should demand that these social media giants become more socially responsible. Why can’t Facebook and Twitter start their own positive messaging campaigns about the betterment of humankind? Why can’t they seek to maximize the potential of citizens around the world? These mediums are not simply a place to “express yourself” as I was told by executives of one of these companies. My God, if that is what they are for, the world is in deeper trouble than I think. (And I am not naive for one second to think that ugly, despicable, and unlawful behavior can ever be fully eliminated in the information age.) We must develop and use twenty-first-century rules and tools differently and stop applying twentieth-century thinking—why can’t these giants of the Internet apply their own positive messaging? What are their values based on? This shouldn’t require the U.S. government’s involvement. If, however, it does, it will require imagination and intellect that more fully and deeply understands how social media provide a voice to the voiceless—especially women and children. We can do better—the social media giants can do better—but if the U.S. government needs to request their support, then those leaders are missing the point of what they truly have: a means to advance humanity in a positive, more enlightened way.