Why is it in the 15 years since 9/11, after the loss of 7,000 American lives and $2 trillion plus in treasure, we have failed to win the war against Global Jihad? That is the question answered in a new book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War by Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a recognized authority on counterterrorism and Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University. He is a much sought after guest on Fox News, BBC, CNN, Sky News and The Lisa Benson Radio Show. Listen to this podcast of a January 9, 2016 broadcast with Dr. Gorka and former commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, Co. Richard E. Kemp (ret.) CBE.
It is not lost on many Americans that within months following 9/11, we failed to capture Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri in Tora Bora despite a US Special Ops team on horseback supported by C-130 Spectre gunships and an Afghan warlord’s fighters had vanquished the Taliban. See: Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.
Dr. Gorka suggests that mired in political correctness we failed to identify the threat as the fanatical hybrid Islamic equivalent of the atheist tyranny of Soviet Communism. He argues that the next US President should revisit the case study of the 40 year containment policies that brought down the “evil empire.” The next President and his national security team need to revisit the seminal “long telegram” by American diplomat in Moscow George Kennan which led to President Truman’s 1947 declaration of war against Soviet Communism’s threat to “bury us.” The details of that plan are contained in Paul Nitze’s 1950 NSC-68 document roadmap. Both documents are included in an appendix to Gorka’s book.
Soviet tyranny is rivetingly depicted in Gorka’s prologue about his Hungarian refugee parents who escaped to freedom during the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. He discusses his father’s betrayal by the famed Soviet mole in MI-6, Kim Philby, which led to his imprisonment and torture under Hungarian Communists. Gorka learned from his parents, Paul and Susan, that “Freedom is as precious as it is fragile. If you are complacent, there will always eventually come a group that will try to take your freedom away from you by violence and through the subversion of your values.”
Gorka contends “the current threat is hybrid totalitarianism that goes beyond man-made justifications for perfecting society along politically defined lines and instead uses the religion of Islam and Allah as justification.”
He defines that threat as a “global jihadist movement […] There is no middle ground. […]The infidel must submit or be killed.”
Gorka lays out the underlying Islamic doctrine in a masterfully succinct depiction of the various dimensions of historic Jihad doctrinal development. Accordingly, Gorka says that we lost our way following 9/11 in the brilliant opening stages of the misnamed GWOT (global war on terrorism) in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We forgot we came to both theaters of operation to quickly crush and destroy the Jihadis who attacked us and became mired in mission creep endeavoring to remake both countries as functioning democracies against the historic realities of both tribal and religious sectarian divisions. The worst example of that was in Iraq. After crushing Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime and defeating its military, President Bush allowed his personal emissary, State Department official Paul Bremer, to become the “viceroy” of Baghdad. That left a 300,000 man unpaid and well-armed Army to revolt against the American occupation and its leaders. This facilitated an alliance with the al Qaeda in Iraq that morphed into ISIS and the self-declared Caliphate of the Islamic State.
Gorka contends that misuse of military, especially special operator assets, in counter insurgency programs to remake both Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush was a folly. President Obama’s election as Commander in Chief worsened the problem by portraying the Iraq war as “bad” versus the Afghan one as “good” because the latter represented the epicenter of al Qaeda.
This gave rise to Obama relying on the “kinetic” tactic of killing Jihadi leaders of al Qaeda and its affiliates in what amounted to a “whack a mole” strategy that failed to win the war. That was compounded by Obama’s doctrine that denied any mention of Islam and Jihad. Islam was depicted as a “religion of peace” in Presidential speeches in Ankara and Cairo. The strategy of temporary surges of combat troops was only a hiatus separating sectarian Shia / Sunni internal conflicts in Iraq or suppressing Taliban re-emergence in Afghanistan, now ironically supplanted by ISIS.
Gorka provides background to the emergence of Global Jihadism by following the evolution in post Qur’anic Islamic Doctrine. He dismisses the Jihad as “inner struggle” argument, instead concentrating on “jihad of the sword” which went through several stages of evolution over the 1,400 years since Mohammed. He cites the seven “swords” of imperialist Jihad:
• The suppression of apostate subjects, or “false Muslims”;
• Revolution against “false” Muslim leaders;
• The anti-colonial struggle and the “purification” of the
religion;
• Countering Western influence and jahiliyyah, or pagan
ignorance of Allah;
• Guerrilla warfare against infidel invaders; and,
• The direct targeting of civilians in terrorist attacks
