Endless War is Bin Laden's Whole Point
Sept. 11, 2003 -- Most wars in U.S. history have had some clear moment of final resolution. But the war against terrorism — even with its finite beginning on that horrible September morning two years ago — is not likely to end with the same conclusive certainty.
In fact, eternal conflict — endless war — is the whole point for Osama bin Laden and his loyalists. It was clearly part of the message on his latest audiotape, broadcast Wednensday on Al Jazeera and meant to invigorate and motivate his followers to continue their jihad ad infinitum .
"Engaging in warfare, conducting raids and terrorist attacks, entering into battle itself, provides rewards," says Brian Jenkins, terrorism expert at The Rand Corporation. "Without action, Osama bin Laden is a picture on a T-shirt, " he said.
"For the jihadis, war is a condition, war is perpetual, war is infinite," Jenkins adds."Going to battle, for them, is like going to church."
Wars Collide
Of course, not all Muslims accept that theology, but for al Qaeda and its disciples, it is a cardinal tenet of their faith — one particularly hard for Americans to understand.
"The characterization of war in the Western sense cannot be applied to what is going on," explains Akbar Ahmed, professor of international relations at American University. "What you are seeing are two different civilizations with different cultural codes and different ways of fighting wars, with different objectives, interacting now at this moment in history."
In the West, "we see war as a finite undertaking," Jenkins adds. "It has a beginning and an end. Therefore, we're anxious to measure progress, weigh the cost, know the score. Those are typically Western things — especially American things."
Keeping score in a perpetual war isn't easy. Except for bin Laden, his chief lieutenant Ayman al Zawahiri, and their immediate cadre, America's enemies remain mostly unseen and unidentified. They form an amorphous, anonymous army, with no uniformed battalions or brigades and no dependable estimates of its size. There is no way to be sure whether a prisoner captured or a plot foiled marks a major turn in the tide, or simply a minor skirmish.
To Conquer the World
Even if al Qaeda's leaders are taken out, their war will go on without them, Ahmed says. Their objective is the restoration of the seventh-century Khalifet: it calls for Islam to one day dominate the world.
In that ongoing process, bin Laden has other objectives, including getting U.S. troops out of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East (most, incidentally, have already left Saudi Arabia); eliminating the Saudi royal house; supporting the Palestinians and opposing Israelis; and replacing governments, like Egypt's and Pakistan's, that he deems insufficiently Islamic.
But those causes serve as mere recruiting posters for al Qaeda. "He uses those appeals to convert Islam's discontents into support for his particular brand of jihad," Jenkins says.
Today’s Fight, Tomorrow’s War
In the meantime, al Qaeda is encouraging loyalists to join a guerrilla war against U.S. troops in Iraq, in the faith that the Americans will eventually decide to quit, pack up and leave.
"They do reach back and talk about how the Americans, when faced with losses, will pull out as they did in Beirut, as they did in Somalia, as the Soviets did in Afghanistan," Jenkins says. "'We only have to make the situation ungovernable,'" Jenkins says they argue, "and impose sufficient losses. Their will is inferior to ours.'"
Yet far from conceding, President Bush almost appears to welcome the presence of terrorists in Iraq. "We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet them on our own streets, in our own cities," he said in a speech to the nation Sunday.
But with nearly one American casualty a day in Iraq and Afghanistan, some wonder how long the President's confidence can last.
"We may ourselves correctly say that this is not a crusade for us, that we are not opposed to Islam, that we don't want this fight, that we are not engaged in a religious war," Jenkins says. But to the jihadis, that distinction remains "a bizzare concept."
"There are no separations between the political world and the world of religion — and for them, this is a religious war. So they will go on fighting," perhaps for generations to come.