Public Intelligence Blog

Inside the Ring: Ideological war on terror needed

Bill Gertz

Washington Times, 14 November 2012

The U.S. military made impressive gains on the battlefield and covertly in countering Islamist terrorists since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the military and government at large so far have failed to strike the religiously motivated ideology behind al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.

That’s the conclusion of a new book, Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies From Communism to Islamism, by a group of specialists urging the U.S. government to apply the lessons of the Cold War defeat of the Soviet Union to Islamist terrorism.

One of the authors, irregular warfare specialist Sebastian L. Gorka, stated that the United States in the past 10 years successfully degraded al Qaeda’s ability to inflict harm on the United States. However, he writes,”al Qaeda has become even more powerful in the domain of ideological warfare and other indirect forms of attack.”

The problem for the U.S. government is “political correctness” toward Islam that has the prevented accurate identification of the enemy’s threat doctrine. For example, the Obama administration’s insistence on calling the Fort Hood, Texas, terrorist attack by Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan “workplace violence” is crippling efforts to strike at the ideology Mr. Gorka calls “global jihadism” – defined as both the violent and nonviolent theory and practice of imposing Islamic supremacy globally.

“Although we have proven our capacity in the last 10 years kinetically to engage our enemy at the operational and tactical level with unsurpassed effectiveness, we have not even begun to take the war to al Qaeda at the strategic level of counter-ideology, to attack it at its heart – the ideology of global jihad,” he states.

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