Strategic Paradigms by Ehsan Ahrari

President Barack H. Obama’s campaign slogans of “a time for a change” and “yes we can” are filtering into his speeches and his actions toward the world of Islam.  He is serious about bringing an end to the poisonous frame of reference that the concept of “the clash of civilizations” presents for Muslims.  In this sense, he is busy slaying the beast that that idea has become in the past fifteen or more years.  President Obama’s interview with al-Arabiyya soon after he entered the White House, his message to the Iranian people on the day of the Nowroze (Iranian New Year), and his trip to Turkey were the most credible examples of that reality.  However, Obama’s battle with the beast is challenging and does not guarantee a victory at this point.

All historical eras and events are associated with some slogan or idea.  Rightly or wrongly, they serve as a clarion call for nations either to accept or to reject them, and then use them as guideposts for their policies.  The First World War’s moniker was “a war to end all wars,” and that phrase became a cause célèbre for its supporters as a rationale for sacrifices.  The Second World War was depicted as “the last good war,” not because any war is good, but because it “was a war that had to be fought and won.”   The phrase “containment” [of communism] remained a major driving force for the Cold War in the United States as well as in the so-called “free world.”

When the United States was attacked by a number of Middle Eastern terrorists on September 11, 2001, the phrase “post-9/11 era” was frequently used by the analysts all over the world, especially to describe its gruesome side.  It was more than a casual phrase.  It was the beginning of new but sinister way of thinking about how to deal with global terrorism and how the United States would go about determining which countries are on its side and which have a soft spot for terrorists.  The Bush administration declared a “war” against it, and the world had to become familiar with another phrase, the “global war on terrorism” or GWOT. 

That phrase itself became a lightning rod for controversy in Europe and the rest of the world.  The critics asked how the lone superpower could declare a war against an action and expect to become a winner.  Another group of critics asked how the United States could expect to win against “global terrorism” by applying only its military muscle. 

The United States, wittingly or unwittingly, treated “global terrorism” as a monolithic entity along the same flawed lines whereby “international communism” was depicted in the Cold War years as a “monolithic” force that could be tackled and defeated.  It was only in the late 1950s—during the second administration of President Dwight Eisenhower—and later on that the United States moved away from that silly notion of monolithism in portraying communism. 

The concept the “clash of civilizations” became divisive in the early 1990s when it was coined by Samuel Huntington.  In that decade, the debate on the utility of that concept largely involved only American, and a few Asian and European, intellectuals who labeled it contentious and partially correct in explaining the emerging conflict after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991.  American strategic thinkers, after getting so used to dealing with the mega-conflict of the Cold War years, thought that a conflict along the same magnitude would become the dominant basis of a division of nation-states in several camps.  So the concept “civilizational conflict”—which Huntington borrowed from the writings of Phillip Hitti and Bernard Lewis—appeared as a logical way of thinking “big” about the post-Cold war era.

Usama Bin Laden’s public musings between the late 1990s and 2001 about declaring a “Jihad” against the U.S. and the West became the basis for “legitimizing” and globalizing Huntington’s proposition related to Islam and Christianity.  However, once the United States was attacked by Muslim terrorists, who, as it was later known, were carrying out a plot that was personally blessed by Bin Laden himself, no doubts were left in the minds of American and Western strategic thinkers about how “prescient” Huntington really was all along. 

In Muslim countries, the clash of civilizations also caught on as an idea legitimizing the “fact” that the United States had declared a war against Islam.  President George W. Bush’s uninformed use of the phrase “crusade,” was treated as “evidence” of that “fact” in the world of Islam.

However, it was Bush’s decision to invade Iraq soon after he invaded Afghanistan that became the chief basis for the “credibility” to the proposition in the world of Islam that the leitmotif for the U.S. presence in Muslim countries was to enslave them and change the essence of Islam into something that is very much akin to Christianity. 

Needless to say, despite his one-time use of the unfortunate phrase “crusade,” Bush reiterated that America had no fight against Islam and that America respects Islam.  But that country’s continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq was speaking louder than Bush’s words, and the lone superpower was envisioned as an “enemy” of Islam.  As the table from the Pew Research Center shows, a majority of people in a number of Muslim countries continued to envision the United States as a military threat.

President Obama’s overtures toward the world of Islam, indeed, are welcoming.  However, what is needed is substantive policy change.  His decision to create a distance between President Hamid Karzai’s government and the U.S. is a positive development.  However, one has to wait and see how that transformation is reflected in other policy measures that his administration intends to bring about in Afghanistan. 

President Obama’s overall approach to “PafAf” is also comprehensive and promising.  However, one has to wait and see how the “surge” of troops in Afghanistan affects that country’s stability.  America’s continued use of drones to carry out attacks in the Pak-Afghan border areas is weakening the support of the Zardari government.  But, given the fact that such attacks have also resulted in a few deaths of al-Qaida and Taliban groups, there is little doubt that such attacks will continue.  Despite having a comprehensive approach to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the United States appears confused about what other modalities it ought to develop in its policies to persuade its NATO allies that Afghanistan will be stabilized in the near future. 

In the absence of a clear-cut indication of America’s success in stabilization of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the notion of the clash of civilizations—even though it has lost a substantial aspect of its popularity in South Asia and in other Muslim countries—is likely to be revived.  Such a happenstance is likely to be one of the greatest challenges to President Obama’s well-meaning new approach to the world of Islam.  He has initiated his battle for slaying the beast of the clash of civilizations.  For now, at least, his administration appears to be waging an uphill battle.