In the last weeks of 2004, two reports from leading centres of analysis in Washington combine to give a bleak assessment of United States efforts both in countering al-Qaida and curbing insurgency in Iraq.
Bruce Hoffman, head of the Rand Corporations Washington office and an acknowledged specialist on paramilitary violence, examines al-Qaidas progress in the current issue of the journal Conflict and Terrorism; while Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the sharpest analysts of middle-east security, considers the Iraq insurgency in a new report.
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Bruce Hoffman concludes that al-Qaida has undergone a remarkable transformation in the past three years, remains formidably active and is being boosted in its support by the US occupation of Iraq.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaida was an organised entity with a settled hierarchy of command, operating in Afghanistan by supporting the Taliban in its civil war against the Northern Alliance. Now, Hoffman writes, it has become;
more of an idea or a concept than an organization; an amorphous movement tenuously held together by a loosely networked transnational constituency rather than a monolithic international terrorist organization with either a defined or an identifiable command and control apparatus.
Al-Qaida, continues Hoffman, has become a vast enterprise an international movement or franchise operation with like-minded local representatives, loosely connected to a central ideological or motivational base, but advancing their common goals independently of each other. Such an entity is far more difficult to counter than a traditionally-structured paramilitary group; but even more problematic for the United States is that its own actions in Iraq are having the effect of strengthening al-Qaida, in two ways allowing it to exploit the occupation as a rousing propaganda and recruitment tool for the global jihadist cause and tying down US forces that might otherwise be used to pursue George W Bushs war on terror.
Anthony Cordesmans study of the insurgency in Iraq is no less bleak. Its scathing analysis describes how the US failed to come to grips with the Iraqi insurgency in virtually every important dimension, and delivers the withering judgment: As late as July 2004, the Administrations senior spokesmen still seemed to live in a fantasyland in terms of their public pronouncements, perception of the growing Iraqi hostility to the use of Coalition forces, and the size of the threat.
At present, US military representatives emphasise the degree of intimidation of ordinary Iraqis by the insurgents, and see this as a major reason for their lack of cooperation with US forces and the government of Iyad Allawi. Cordesmans view is that this evades a far more significant trend: the widespread antagonism to the occupation among ordinary Iraqis. This may not always translate into actual paramilitary violence but it does frequently involve cooperation with the insurgents, not least in providing intelligence about US forces, their policies and plans.
It is now widely recognised that the level of infiltration by insurgent elements into the Iraqi police and newly re-established army is considerable; the bombing of a canteen at a tightly-guarded US military compound in Mosul on 20 December that killed twenty-two people (including, apparently, the suicide-bomber responsible) seems to have been such an inside job. There are suspicions that Iraqis working directly for the Americans, as well as for the Allawi regime, are also regular sources of intelligence. Moreover, the insurgents themselves have evolved increasingly sophisticated methods of attack, often staying ahead of US forces as they try to respond to the latest development.
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Cordesman also queries the supposed counter-insurgency success of the assault on Fallujah. He points to the numerous attacks in a whole range of Iraqi towns and cities at the very time that US forces were trying to subdue the city in what was presented as a process of breaking the back of the insurgency. Cordesman sees little hope of an early US withdrawal from Iraq, and foresees rather years of involvement in a very insecure and violent environment.
The stark assessments and conclusions of Stanley Hoffman and Anthony Cordesman, coming as they do from two highly respectable think-tanks, are worth taking seriously. These are, after all, no wild-eyed openDemocracy columnists, but sober specialists who in normal circumstances would be taken seriously by a US administration.
As the fourth year of the war on terror approaches, with no prospect of an early end in sight, there are few signs that they will be.
