scoring the global war on terror

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http://www.nationofchange.org/scoring-global-war-terror-1329668103

With the United States now well into the sec­ond decade of what the Pen­ta­gon has styled an “era of per­sis­tent con­flict,” the war for­merly known as the global war on ter­ror­ism (un­of­fi­cial acronym WFKAT­G­WOT) ap­pears in­creas­ingly frag­mented and dif­fuse. With­out achiev­ing vic­tory, yet un­will­ing to ac­knowl­edge fail­ure, the United States mil­i­tary has with­drawn from Iraq. It is try­ing to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally un­likely to yield a happy out­come.

Else­where -- in Pak­istan, Libya, Yemen, and So­ma­lia, for ex­am­ple -- U.S. forces are busily open­ing up new fronts. Pub­lished re­ports that the United States is es­tab­lish­ing “a con­stel­la­tion of se­cret drone bases” in or near the Horn of Africa and the Ara­bian Penin­sula sug­gest that the scope of op­er­a­tions will only widen fur­ther. In a front-page story, the New York Times de­scribed plans for “thick­en­ing” the global pres­ence of U.S. spe­cial op­er­a­tions forces. Rushed Navy plans to con­vert an aging am­phibi­ous land­ing ship into an “afloat for­ward stag­ing base” -- a mo­bile launch plat­form for ei­ther com­mando raids or minesweep­ing op­er­a­tions in the Per­sian Gulf -- only re­in­forces the point. Yet as some fronts close down and oth­ers open up, the war’s nar­ra­tive has be­come in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult to dis­cern. How much far­ther until we reach the WFKAT­G­WOT’s equiv­a­lent of Berlin? What ex­actly is the WFKAT­G­WOT’s equiv­a­lent of Berlin? In fact, is there a sto­ry­line here at all?

Viewed close-up, the “war” ap­pears to have lost form and shape. Yet by tak­ing a cou­ple of steps back, im­por­tant pat­terns begin to ap­pear. What fol­lows is a pre­lim­i­nary at­tempt to score the WFKAT­G­WOT, di­vid­ing the con­flict into a bout of three rounds. Al­though there may be sev­eral ad­di­tional rounds still to come, here’s what we’ve suf­fered through thus far.

The Rums­feld Era

Round 1: Lib­er­a­tion. More than any other fig­ure -- more than any gen­eral, even more than the pres­i­dent him­self -- Sec­re­tary of De­fense Don­ald Rums­feld dom­i­nated the war’s early stages. Ap­pear­ing for a time to be a larger-than-life fig­ure -- the “Sec­re­tary at War” in the eyes of an ador­ing (if fickle) neo­con fan club -- Rums­feld ded­i­cated him­self to the propo­si­tion that, in bat­tle, speed holds the key to vic­tory. He threw his con­sid­er­able weight be­hind a high-tech Amer­i­can ver­sion of blitzkrieg. U.S. forces, he reg­u­larly in­sisted, were smarter and more agile than any ad­ver­sary. To em­ploy them in ways that took ad­van­tage of those qual­i­ties was to guar­an­tee vic­tory. The jour­nal­is­tic term adopted to de­scribe this con­cept was “shock and awe.”