Higher Miseducation

Patrick Poole

f you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” This famous maxim by the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu is familiar to every student of military science and strategy. His counsel is simple: understand your enemy, understand yourself. Some seven-and-a-half years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, important segments of our military infrastructure dedicated to training and educating the next generation of military leaders give every indication of having failed to heed Sun Tzu’s advice.

Strategic collapse at the Army War College

A recent post by Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks on his Foreign Policy blog provides evidence of this strategic collapse at one of the country’s top military education institutions.1 In it, Ricks reported on a new publication by Sherifa Zuhur, a research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. Zuhur’s study, HAMAS and Israel: Conflicting Strategies of Group-Based Politics,2 published just a few days before the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and HAMAS in Gaza, informs readers that HAMAS has been misunderstood due to misreporting by “Israeli and Western sources that villainize the group,” and urges the U.S. government to embrace it through negotiations, despite ongoing acts of terror.

In fact, Zuhur squarely places the blame of failure for peace between Israel and the Palestinians on Israel, namely its refusal to recognize HAMAS as the legitimate government in Gaza. “Israel’s stance towards the democratically-elected Palestinian government headed by HAMAS in 2006, and towards Palestinian national coherence—legal, territorial, political, and economic—has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking,” she writes.3 Conveniently unmentioned are the nearly 6,000 rockets and mortars the terrorist group has fired indiscriminately into southern Israel since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005.4

She also blames U.S. policies for the terrorist group’s hostility towards America, but takes pains to assure readers that, unlike al-Qaeda, Gaza’s radicals have no plans to take their jihad global. “As a result of U.S. hostility to HAMAS, the organization increasingly regards the U.S. administration, although not the American people, as an enemy,” writes Zuhur. “However, HAMAS is not interested in a global jihad like al-Qa’ida [sic], and maintains that its only foe is Israel, hoping that better communications with the United States will emerge, and recognizing that its ofÞcials’ inability to travel and speak with Americans has damaged its image.”5

This, of course, ignores the long string of threats against the U.S. and other Western nations by HAMAS leadership going back more than a decade.6 Nor does it account for the organization’s overt solidarity with al-Qaeda’s war against America. Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the New York Times reported that HAMAS organized a student rally at the Islamic University of Gaza, where speakers led the crowd in anti-American slogans while students carried pictures of Osama bin Laden and others bearing the statement “HAMAS hails Bin Laden.” And in November 2001, a column ran in the HAMAS weekly newspaper, Al-Risala, recommending that anthrax be placed in the American water supply.7

Rather, according to Zuhur, what really clouds the judgment of Israeli and U.S. thinking is that both countries have fallen prey to their own propaganda, which pays undue attention to the rabidly anti-Jewish elements of the 1988 HAMAS Covenant and its calls for the total destruction of Israel, while failing to recognize that HAMAS has developed into an enlightened, progressive organization.8 Calls for the violent destruction of the state of Israel notwithstanding, Zuhur recommends that both Jerusalem and Washington “abandon their policies of non-negotiation and non-communication with HAMAS,” even as HAMAS rockets continue to rain down on southern Israel.

To do so, Zuhur proposes that America attempt to create a division between the social and political apparatus of HAMAS and its terrorist wings, in order to render the organization more acceptable.9 Never mind that this approach has been mocked by no less an authority than HAMAS leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar himself, who has made clear that:

HAMAS responds to all questions related to the life of the citizens not only in the case of confrontation but also in the political, economic, social, health, and internal relations field. This movement has proved that it is one organic unit. Mistaken is the one who thinks that the military wing acts outside the framework of HAMAS or behaves recklessly.10

Of course, the short- and long-term policy implications of following Zuhur’s recommendations could very well be catastrophic. Embracing HAMAS as the legitimate government of Gaza would effectively reward it for its violent takeover of the territory in June 2007, and the terror haven it has created there since. The relationship between HAMAS and Iran is also a factor, since—given the growing military support given to HAMAS by the Iranian regime in recent years—an American embrace would encourage the entrenchment of an Iranian proxy to Israel’s south, to complement the Hezbollah threat from the north. Finally, U.S. engagement with HAMAS—a designated terrorist organization under federal law—would send a dangerous signal to American allies such as India, the Philippines and Afghanistan, each of which is waging its own campaign against Islamist terrorism, that Washington has abandoned its principles in favor of accommodation with its enemies. Yet such is the state of affairs and the strategic vision amongst some segments of the military academic community.

A larger strategic problem

As troubling as Zuhur’s approach is, it is only representative of a larger rot in the U.S. military’s halls of higher learning: a failure to adequately and truthfully engage the ideas of Islamic terrorists. As defense expert and author Mark Perry tells Ricks:

It’s worse than you think. They have curtailed the curriculum so that their students are not exposed to radical Islam. Akin to denying students access to Marx during the Cold War.11

This is hardly the first complaint that the military has failed to investigate and assess the strategic writings related to radical Islam and Islamic war doctrine to adequately assess the enemy threat. William Gawthrop, the former head of the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence Field Activity, lamented in a military intelligence journal article not long ago that:

As late as early 2006, the senior service colleges of the Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader. As a consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered.12

Another vocal critic of our military’s strategic studies is Army Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Myers, who has argued that understanding the Islamic doctrine of war is a basic necessity for our military leadership. “To understand war, one has to study its philosophy; the grammar and logic of your opponent. Only then are you approaching strategic comprehension,” Myers writes. “To understand the war against Islamist terrorism one must begin to understand the Islamic way of war, its philosophy and doctrine, the meanings of jihad in Islam—and one needs to understand that those meanings are highly varied and utilitarian depending on the source.13 Not doing so leaves our own military strategy aimless and increases our long-term vulnerability to further terrorist attacks.”14

One cause for this deficiency can be found in the strategic documents of the U.S. government itself, namely the 2006 National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism, which states that the U.S. government and its agencies “will not automatically adopt a common assessment of the threat or a common understanding of the nature of the war; nor will U.S. coalition partners.”15 This amounts to a stunning admission. Simply put, our fighting forces have made a deliberate decision to forgo Sun Tzu’s advice to know our enemy.

At least some experts have attempted to inject some strategic clarity in our discussions of our enemies. But more often than not, they have paid dearly for it. That was the case with former Joint Chiefs of Staff J-2 analyst Stephen Coughlin, whose master’s thesis at the National Defense Intelligence University examined texts from multiple schools of Islamic jurisprudence to evaluate the respective traditions on jihad and their contemporary use by Islamic terrorists. Coughlin’s conclusion? That failing to investigate these sources has left our military “disarmed in the war of ideas.”16 Coughlin’s thesis had barely seen the light of day before he was promptly sacked from his position with the Joint Chiefs, having running afoul of another Pentagon official, Hesham Islam, a top-ranked Muslim advisor to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who took issue with Coughlin’s academic analysis.17

Culling the herd of one’s critics, as seen in the Coughlin affair, may forge a consensus within the military community, but it does not make our forces any more prepared to fight the “long war” against global Islamic terrorism. In fact, quite the opposite.

Linguistic sleight-of-hand

Another manner in which this strategic blindness has crept into our federal government is the self-styled “Truespeak” movement, led primarily by Jim Guirard of the Truespeak Institute. Truespeak advocates an end to the use of standard Islamic terms used to identify terrorists, such as “jihadist” and “mujahideen.” Instead, its proponents argue that other Arabic terms, such as “hiraba” and “mufsidoon,” which have connotations of banditry and criminal activity, are better used to attempt to deny Islamic terrorists religious legitimacy. It is also driven by ideological concerns to free institutional Islam from the taint of Islamic terrorism.

The earliest proponent of this new lexicon appears to be University of Michigan professor Sherman Jackson, whose article “Domestic Terrorism in the Islamic Legal Tradition”18 advocates this new terminology. The article is based on a series of lectures Jackson delivered prior to the 9/11 attacks, so his argument is not colored by those events. Many articles on this topic published since 9/11 defending this shift refer back to Jackson’s 2001 treatment of the subject, and Guirard specifically cites Jackson in support of his “Truespeak lexicon.”

However, one problem immediately appears when someone tries to use Jackson’s analysis: he admits that the language is confined to “domestic terrorism”—a point never mentioned by those appealing to this analysis for blanket application of this terminology. In his first endnote, Jackon explains the difficulty from the viewpoint of Islamic law to apply the lexicon to international terrorism:

I limit my discussion in this paper to domestic terrorism because a discussion of international terrorism would take us into the complicated issue of extraterritoriality and the question of the applicability of Islamic law outside the lands of Islam, an issue on which the jurists differed widely.19

Thus, while Jackson’s new lexicon might apply to “sudden jihad syndrome” of Muslims living in the West committing spontaneous, limited and “leaderless” acts of terror, applying the label of hiraba to international terrorist activities becomes problematic from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence, which he admits has a wide range of opinion.

Second, while Jackson states that hiraba fits nicely with the FBI’s definition of terrorism, he then issues three qualifications that severely negate its use with reference to al-Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations. Thus, “to the extent that a group declares itself or is deemed by the government to be acting in pursuit of political objectives… their activity is actually less likely to fall under the law of hirabah,” while “the greater the number of individuals involved in a prima facie act of terrorism, the less likely to fall under the laws of hirabah” and the fact that “hirabah, at least in its fully developed form, appears to be potentially a much broader category than terrorism proper, covering as it does a spectrum of crimes ranging from breaking and entering to ‘hate crimes’ to rape….”20

Experts have taken note of the inherent contradictions in this approach. As Walid Phares of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies points out, “In Arab Muslim history, a Hiraba (unauthorized warring) was when a group of warriors launched itself against the enemy without orders from the real commander. Obviously, this implies that a ‘genuine’ war against a real enemy does exist and that these hotheaded soldiers have simply acted without orders. Hence this cunning explanation puts ‘spin’ on jihad but leaves the core idea of jihadism completely intact.”21

Such textual problems and criticism, however, have not prevented the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the State Department, various commands of the U.S. military, and other federal agencies from adopting the Truespeak lexicon as de facto government policy. The first such measure was a January 2008 memorandum published by the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which suggested that a “negative climate” was being created by the use of “jihadist” and other such phrases connecting terrorism with Islam, resulting in attacks and discrimination against American Muslims.22 This claim, however, flies in the face of hate crime statistics recently released by the FBI which show that anti-Muslim incidents have dropped precipitously since the 9/11 attacks, and declined by 26.3 percent between 2006 and 2007 (the most recent period for which complete information is available).23

Another difficulty with the DHS recommendations concerns the authorities relied upon to support both the need for a new lexicon and development of alternative terms to be used. The memorandum references a May 8, 2007, meeting between then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and a group of “influential Muslim Americans,” during which the discussion turned to the terminology used to describe the terrorists. But a closer look at the four Muslim leaders who were part of that meeting with Chertoff and who recommended the adoption of new terminology to describe Islamic terrorism raises serious questions. A June 2007 San Francisco Chronicle article identified the four individuals as Akbar Ahmed, former High Commissioner from Pakistan to Great Britain and chair of Islamic Studies at American University; M.J. Khan, a Houston city councilman; Shahed Amanullah, a Muslim blogger and editor of AltMuslim.com; and Reza Aslan, an author and creative writing professor at the University of California-Irvine.24

While all of these individuals may be accomplished in their respective fields, none has any qualifications whatsoever to speak authoritatively on these finely detailed nuances of Islamic law. Even Professor Ahmed’s authority could be questioned by those in the Muslim world, as his entire education has been conducted in Britain and he has no specific training from the authoritative centers of Islamic jurisprudence, such as Al-Azhar or the Islamic University of Medina. As for the supposed intent of these guidelines to help influence the Muslim world, all of the “experts” in question live and work in the United States, and relying on their opinions to speak on attitudes and opinions of the entire Muslim world smacks of precisely the Western-centric attitudes that this new terminology claims to counteract.

Another recent attempt to institute the Truespeak lexicon as official government policy came in the form of a State Department report prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center,25 which proscribes the use of “jihadist” or “mujahedin” with reference to terrorists and claims that “calling our enemies ‘jihadis’ and their movement a global ‘jihad’ unintentionally legitimizes their actions.”26

This movement has impacted discussions in the military community as well. Leading the charge has been Douglas Streusand of the National Defense University, who co-authored a short paper in 2006 recommending the adoption of the Truespeak lexicon.27 A more recent defense of these efforts appeared in the Autumn 2008 edition of the Army War College Journal, Parameters, authored by Daniel Roper, Director of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center.28 Roper’s article invokes the authority of the DHS memorandum and the work of Jim Guirard of the Truespeak Institute in support of this shift in terminology.

In response, analysts and contractors attached to the U.S. Central Command’s “Red Team” prepared a report that criticized these efforts:

There are a growing number of U.S.G documents that suggest that we stand in danger of (if we have not already) demonizing Islam and/or associating all Muslims with violence simply by invoking the Islamic identity, or Islamic goals, of a particular extremist group. While there is concern that we not label all Muslims as Islamist terrorists, it is proper to address certain aspects of violence as uniquely Islamic…The fact is our enemies cite the sources of Islam as the foundation of their global jihad. We are left with the responsibility of portraying our enemies in an honest and accurate fashion.29

The Red Team report goes on to observe that much of the terminology that Truespeak advocates want to see banned is in fact common usage in the Muslim world, and the recommended usage of the lexicon is entirely foreign to the audience they are attempting to influence. For instance, most of the Muslim world already refers to Islamic terrorists as “jihadists.” The Red Team analysis concludes that a great many of these efforts to change the lexicon are driven by emotional and political responses, not by exegetical debate or examination of Islamic sources.

Addressing our strategic blindness

The strategic blindness seen at the U.S. Army War College and throughout the federal government is entirely self-imposed. Efforts to impose the Truespeak lexicon are little more than wishful thinking and a very poor foundation on which to establish national policy in a time of war.

In the case of Sherifa Zuhur’s recent apologia for HAMAS, the issue is not one of academic freedom as much as an abandonment of our most basic principles. A slackening of our will to preserve long-held moral values, such as our refusal to negotiate with terrorist organizations, apparently runs through all levels of our military senior service schools and the federal government, and has occurred without any discussion or debate whatsoever. There is no way to determine how far this rot extends, but it is important to note that this condition has not yet been acknowledged, let alone addressed.

It is only compounded by our failure to understand the Islamic sources to which our enemy constantly appeals. By automatically discounting terrorist references to Islamic texts and traditions, important insights into their strategy and methodology are missed. The end result is that we limit—rather than expand—our understanding of our enemy. The intellectual and strategic groundwork for the “long war” against Islamic terrorism will never be accomplished as long as our senior service schools and military academies continue to neglect this vital area of strategic study.

One reason for the reluctance to study Islamic war doctrine is no doubt rooted in our American tradition of secularism. Attempting to assess and judge religious views is unfamiliar territory, and fraught with peril. But that does not mean that it should be avoided. If we are to win the battle against Islamic terrorism, we must come to understand it by familiarizing ourselves with its ideas and sources, not trying to rationalize our institutional neglect or define away our intellectual discomfort. Regardless of what one might think about the relationship between Islamic theology and jihadist justifications for terror, it is a fact that our adversaries believe they are operating in accordance with Islamic tradition. Islamic war doctrine ought to be studied on that basis alone.

Returning to Sun Tzu’s maxim, perhaps the root of our military’s current strategic schizophrenia is not so much about our refusal to understand our enemies as much as it is a failure to understand ourselves. As a nation, we no longer have a sense of who we are, what we believe, or even why we fight. The present war has exposed those fault lines. Our most basic values are at stake, not just from external threats, but also from within. Consider this: at the height of World War II, would research professors at the Army War College have even considered attempting to defend Nazi fascism or Japanese imperialism, as Sherifa Zuhur has now done with HAMAS? Would our military institutions have ever shied away from investigating Communist ideology and Soviet military doctrine for fear of offending the Russian people?

Patrick Poole is a counterterrorism consultant to the military and law enforcement, and a regular contributor to several publications.