With Us and Against Us

How America's Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror

Stephen Tankel

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547345
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush drew a line in the sand, saying, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Since 9/11, many counterterrorism partners have been both "with" and "against" the United States, helping it in some areas and hindering it in others. This has been especially true in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, where the terrorist groups that threaten America are most concentrated. Because so many aspects of U.S. counterterrorism strategy are dependent on international cooperation, the United States has little choice but to work with other countries. Making the most of these partnerships is fundamental to the success of the War on Terror. Yet what the United States can reasonably expect from its counterterrorism partners—and how to get more out of them—remain too little understood.

In With Us and Against Us, Stephen Tankel analyzes the factors that shape counterterrorism cooperation, examining the ways partner nations aid international efforts, as well as the ways they encumber and impede effective action. He considers the changing nature of counterterrorism, exploring how counterterrorism efforts after 9/11 critically differ both from those that existed beforehand and from traditional alliances. Focusing on U.S. partnerships with Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen against al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist organizations, Tankel offers nuanced propositions about what the U.S. can expect from its counterterrorism partners depending on their political and security interests, threat perceptions, and their relationships with the United States and with the terrorists in question. With Us and Against Us offers a theoretically rich and policy-relevant toolkit for assessing and improving counterterrorism cooperation, devising strategies for mitigating risks, and getting the most out of difficult partnerships.

1

COUNTERTERRORISM PARTNERSHIPS IN CONTEXT

Decisions about how to survive and ultimately prevail in the Cold War shaped U.S. foreign policy and relations with other countries from the end of World War II until the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The United States’ aspiration for an open and free international order led it to recruit and support allies and partners for two overarching purposes: to augment American military power in a potential conflict with the Soviet bloc and to keep countries from tilting toward the Soviet Union. The principal challenge facing the United States came from other countries. The end of the Cold War liberated America, at least temporarily, from the type of great-power security competition that had been the geopolitical norm. In search of a new paradigm to replace the security competition with the Soviets that had defined foreign and defense policies for almost fifty years, U.S. leaders embraced the promotion of democracy and protection of human rights. The U.S. government also began paying greater attention to nonstate threats emanating from weak states rather than to the traditional challenges posed by strong countries. These threats included criminal networks, refugee flows, and terrorism. American foreign policy shifted accordingly. It focused less on what other governments did beyond their borders and more on how they behaved within them.1

The 9/11 attacks provided another organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy, one that reinforced the preoccupation with nonstate actors and the internal dynamics of weak countries, especially ones with Muslim-majority populations. Burden sharing by these countries was important during the Cold War but not essential. The United States was often as concerned with wooing client states as it was with what they delivered. When it comes to counterterrorism, especially as practiced after 9/11, the United States simply cannot accomplish many if not most of its objectives without cooperation from its partners. As a result, burden sharing has become more important for the United States. It has also become more complicated for many U.S. partners, especially when the target of cooperation is external to the United States but internal for them. The United States has sometimes pressed these countries to wage war against a subset of their own populations, clamp down on popular support for terrorist causes, deemphasize longstanding internal or regional security priorities, and pursue reforms intended to transform aspects of their polities.

This chapter explores the transformation of U.S. security interests from the Cold War to the War on Terror, contextualizing changes in the nature of terrorism, U.S. counterterrorism policies, and the U.S. approach to alignments along the way. The first section discusses how competition with the Soviet Union informed America’s approach to alignments with countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia during the Cold War. It also demonstrates where terrorism and counterterrorism fit within U.S. foreign policy and the degree to which they were influenced by Cold War dynamics. The next section looks at how the end of the Cold War affected the United States in terms of its security priorities and approach to allies and partners. This section also discusses the growing jihadist threat and nascent attempts at counterterrorism cooperation with states that became critical partners in the wake of 9/11. The final section discusses in broad terms how the U.S. security paradigm changed in response to the September 11 attacks, paying special attention to the United States’ adaptation of old relationships and creation of new ones for the purposes of counterterrorism. Although these partnerships were different from earlier alignments, the foundational theories that explained alignment formation remain relevant for how we think about them.

A “SIMPLER” TIME

The complexity of the post-9/11 world and multiplicity of threats facing the United States can evoke a misplaced nostalgia for the apparent simplicity of the Cold War, as this nostalgia forgets the ever-present danger of nuclear Armageddon during that time. The single overarching U.S. objective was to defeat the Soviet Union, and containment was the strategy for doing so. George Kennan, the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, first outlined the strategy of containment in his “Long Telegram” and developed it in subsequent speeches and writings. At its core, containment argued for keeping the Soviet Union from spreading its influence to Western Europe and other core areas of the globe, including Northeast Asia and the Middle East. In due time, Kennan predicted, the Soviet Union would mellow, as he put it, because of its own internal contradictions.2 Containment guided U.S. foreign policy for four decades, though American efforts to check Soviet expansion were more robust and military focused than Kennan thought necessary. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev began pursuing domestic political and economic reforms that he believed would strengthen the USSR in the long run. Instead, they hastened the Soviet Union’s collapse, which occurred in under a decade.

The simple premise of containment obscures the many complex decisions that implementing it entailed. U.S.-Soviet competition for influence naturally fueled a corresponding bipolar competition for client states and participation in proxy conflicts involving them. The United States not only opposed direct Soviet influence but also leftist and Marxist movements in various countries, based on the premise that ideological solidarity would make them loyal clients of the Soviet Union.3 As a result, the United States was repeatedly forced to determine whether, when, and how to intervene in different countries around the world. There were instances in which the United States accepted victories achieved by communist and leftist forces. Nevertheless, the fear that if one country fell to communism then others in its region might follow—the “domino theory”—still had currency from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War. Efforts to keep countries in the U.S. column reached their apotheosis with the Vietnam War, where America expended considerable blood and treasure supporting the noncommunist regime in South Vietnam. The country was one of nearly fifty treaty allies the United States pledged to defend in the event of an attack. In addition to these formal security guarantees, the United States formalized other types of security arrangements with many more countries.4

Europe was the most important theater in the Cold War. The countries of Western Europe welcomed U.S. protection. Indeed, the first secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) famously described the purpose of the alliance as being “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”5 East Asia was a secondary front but a vital one. Foreign troop deployments were overwhelmingly concentrated in these two regions during the second half of the twentieth century. U.S. forces fought two wars in East Asia—the Korean War in northeastern Asia and then the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia. And U.S. strategists and planners worked hand in glove with their counterparts in NATO member states and with Australia, Japan, and South Korea to build integrated military responses to counter the conventional Soviet and Chinese military threats. In some cases, such as South Korea, the United States essentially rebuilt its allies’ militaries from the ground up.

In addition to forging treaty alliances with countries on the front lines of the Cold War, America also aligned with a host of other states, which one observer termed the “extended family.”6 Many of them were located in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.7 Relations with these countries were notable in several important respects. First, unlike in Europe and East and Southeast Asia, where the United States had permanent allies and adversaries, the portfolio of American partners in these regions was not static. A considerable number of countries were either “nonaligned” or moved back and forth between the NATO and Soviet blocs. This contributed to the U.S. propensity to focus more on forging alignments with some of these countries than on the security cooperation they provided. Second, the United States did not deploy troops or involve itself militarily in the wars fought in these places, for the most part. Instead, the American government adopted an “offshore balancing” approach that entailed a combination of diplomacy, foreign assistance, security cooperation, and arms sales to regional countries to check Soviet influence. Third, partners in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia were not committed to go to war in the event hostilities with the Soviets erupted. Instead, they mainly cooperated with the United States to blunt the expansion of communist influences and provided it with military access, which although vital was not the same as committing to battle. Some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, also contributed financially to anticommunist movements around the world. In short, the states that have been on the front lines since 9/11 mainly played a supporting role during the Cold War.

Pursuing security cooperation with many of these countries was a way to prevent them from falling into the Soviet orbit. This effort often entailed working with anticommunist despots around the world. Most, but not all, of these autocracies were outside Europe.8 Despite the fact that these regimes did not share America’s political values, the United States never attempted to engineer the internal transformation of their countries.9 Instead, American officials gritted their teeth and worked with these so-called friendly dictators. This sometimes included backing their efforts to crush Soviet- or Sino-supported insurgencies or other internal movements that were perceived to be susceptible to communist influence. In other words, with the exception of a potential communist takeover, the internal dimensions of an allied state’s behavior were far less important to the United States than defeating the Soviet Union.

TERRORISM DURING THE COLD WAR

Cold War dynamics greatly influenced the nature of terrorism, which increased markedly after the late 1960s. Successful wars for self-determination waged against colonial powers after World War II spurred other ethnonationalist groups to wage their own “liberation” struggles. One of the most consequential struggles took place in South Vietnam, where the Viet Cong’s fierce and effective resistance against the United States inspired many of the ethnonationalists and leftist groups activating at the time.10 Although most of these terrorist organizations were focused primarily on parochial objectives, they often situated themselves within a wider revolutionary movement aligned against the U.S.-led forces of capitalism and imperialism.11 Thus, while ethnonationalist organizations were most common in the Third World, the leftist revolutionary groups that predominated in the West tended to embrace their brethren’s liberation struggles. Similarly, most ethnonationalist organizations were at least nominally leftist.

The Palestinian struggle for statehood became a prominent and popular cause, ultimately emerging as the heroic model once the Vietnam War ended.12 Many other ethnonationalist and leftist groups supported the Palestinians’ struggle. In addition to serving as a shared focal point for various terrorist organizations, the Palestinian struggle also led to the internationalization of modern terrorism. Several of the major Palestinian groups not only trained numerous terrorist organizations from other countries but also executed attacks across multiple continents and selected targets that had international dimensions. For example, the number of airline hijackings skyrocketed, with over one hundred occurring during the 1970s.13

During the Cold War, the causes for which most terrorists fought made defining terrorism a political issue. The Soviet Union and its client states argued that ethnonationalist or revolutionary groups were freedom fighters, not terrorists. Some Middle Eastern, African, and Asian states that were in the U.S. camp endorsed this distinction. After the Palestinian group Black September massacred eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Saudi Arabia, which was both a stalwart U.S. partner and a staunch advocate for the Palestinian cause, worked hard at the United Nations to avoid having violence committed in pursuit of “national liberation” labeled as “terrorist.”14 Because of the challenges related to defining terrorism, most UN counterterrorism conventions focused on the criminal acts committed, such as hijacking, rather than the nature of the perpetrators.

Most of the major terrorist groups active during the Cold War, along with many smaller ones, benefited from state support. The increase in state sponsorship was largely a function of U.S.-Soviet competition. Moscow sponsored and managed a small number of groups directly. More often, it outsourced these efforts either to other Soviet-bloc countries such as Bulgaria and East Germany or to client states like Libya, Syria, and South Yemen. In many cases, Soviet-bloc countries supported client states that in turn openly sponsored terrorist groups.15 The growing prevalence of state support for terrorism was also a function of efforts by countries in the Arab world to exert more control over the major Palestinian groups.16 After Shiite clerics seized power during the 1979 revolution, Iran became both a recipient of Soviet support and a prolific state sponsor of terrorism in its own right.

Although state sponsorship considerably increased the capacity of a number of terrorist organizations, it also served as a check on their lethality because the supporting countries were leery of triggering reprisals. Most organizations also had their own reasons for limiting the scope of their violence. Ethnonationalists sought to avoid alienating their constituencies. Left-wing terrorists viewed the minimization of violence as an ethical imperative, given their identification with the masses.17 For the most part, this was an era when, as the terrorism expert Brian Jenkins famously observed, “Terrorists want[ed] a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.”18

As terrorist attacks increased in number, if not necessarily lethality, the United States began developing a more comprehensive counterterrorism strategy. Two incidents catalyzed action. The Peoples’ Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four international flights in 1970 and then blew up three at a former British airfield in Jordan after releasing the passengers and crew. Two years later, Black September executed its operation at the Olympics in Munich. President Nixon established a cabinet-level committee to coordinate counterterrorism. It met only once, but the move set in motion an intergovernmental effort to combat terrorism more systematically.19 Two streams of U.S. legal approaches emerged.20 One gave the United States authority to prosecute terrorist crimes that occurred overseas. The other focused on unilateral actions the United States...