I have lived, studied and worked in four Mid-East/North African countries and have spent the last 30 years as a soldier, diplomat and now civil servant delaing with international affairs. Many years ago I was 20 minutes from being blown up by a terrorist bomb, myself. Six people were killed and 40 injured, mainly kids, and have absolutely no sympathy for terrorists of any persuasion.
It is important to realise that Islamists did not invent terrorism. The US was really very lucky (or the FBI very good) in being isolated from the effects of terrorism for so long. We had about 30 years of very active domestic versions here in Europe from about 1970 to 2000. Examples include the IRA, Red Army Faction, Red Brigades, ETA, neo-fascists. There are many similarities between them and the Al-Qaeda(s) of today.
First, the members generally come from two backgrounds. Some are middle-class, well-educated kids with no emotional or social stake in society. I have seen many youths of this type in the Mid-East (as well as remembering them from the 70’s here), who are educated enough to see the feebleness and brutal incompetence of their own leaders, but who do not feel any attraction to liberal democracy. The other group consist of equally rootless semi-criminal kids with no self esteem who are looking for some structure in their lives. Both categories are easy targets for recruitment by “revolutionary” groups.
Such groups thrive on a romantic appeal and on having a defined (if diffuse) enemy. What you do not do, if you want to cut off recruitment, is to accept the opponent’s claim of status. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Mr. Bush did in elevating dealing with Al Qaida to a “War on Terror”. This provides them with all the romantic appeal they could want in their catchment areas as “standing up to the big bully US”. If you want a comparison, just remember how normal providing money to the IRA was seen by many in the US in the 70’s as standing up to the English.
It is true that dealing with the Al Qaida camps in Afghanistan required a military response and a well organised coalition was put together to deal with that. (I have some misgiving regarding the blanket bundling of Al Qaida and the Taliban, though. When I dealt with Afghanistan in the mid-nineties, the US was probably the most Taliban-friendly of the Western nations, largely due to the perceived need for a non-Iranian pipe-line for Central Asian oil. I suspect that the insistence of keeping Taliban prisoners is more an issue of stabilising the present Government of Afghanistan.)
In most cases, fighting terrorism is however best managed viewing it as a criminal activity. This means police should be in the lead, closely linked with intelligence services. The military should be kept available but not visible.
I have no idea what concept of the war against terror motivated the US to go into Iraq. It was a massively brutal, but essentialy secular dictatorship and quite effective in limiting terrorist activity on its territory, by simply killing any suspects.
While the actual fighting of the war was very competently handled by the US, the lack of (preferably civilian) police accompanying the troops baffles me. There was a major opportunity lost there, and a lot of the present insurrection/terrorrism goes back to those weeks.
The US is now engaged in what can only be described as a peace-keeping operation, even if the term is not popular. Unfortunately, the Army Peacekeeping Institute was abolished early in the decade and the competence scattered. This has meant that a lot of time has been lost relearning the craft. Most people do not realise that peace-keeping is usually much more dangerous for the troops than anything but frontline combat. This is because you cannot use overwhelming force in the contacts with the general population (even if you are not actively threatening them). In some ways the most important message you can project is that “you would rather not be there”. This is why civilian police, wearing home uniforms, can play such an efficient role. Training local troops to take over is the other main job.
This is however well understood by the other side (never under-estimate people just because you do not comprehend them) and their strategy is playing out well. They want to insulate the US forces from the local population. They want to force the troops to act defensively and alienate them. They also, with very little success so far, want to provoke the Shiites to retaliate agaist Sunnis. As Ayatollah Sistani is playing a long game, expecting to take control of Iraq at the end, he has however not let that happen, prefering to have Sunnis being confronted by the US.
So, the Sunni insurgents/terrorist are playing a classical “guerilla” game, straight out of the book, the Shias are playing the political game, the Kurds are happy being autonomous provided they can keep Kirkuk, and the US is in the middle, trying to make sense of it. This is not a simple setup and it would be a pity to reduce it to certainties of good guys against bad guys (while the bad guys usually are quite bad, the good guys are usually not that good…) Welcome to the real world