The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [116]
5. Think asymmetrically. The United States has the most powerful military in the history of the world. And yet it has found it difficult to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israeli military is vastly superior to Hezbollah’s forces. But it was not able to win a decisive victory over the latter in its conflict with it. Why? Because the current era is one in which asymmetrical responses have become easier to execute and difficult to defeat. This is true not simply in war. Consider the rise of drug cartels, money-laundering syndicates, migrant workers, and terrorists, all far smaller and poorer than the governments that oppose them. In an age of constant activity across and within borders, small groups of people with ingenuity, passion, and determination have important advantages.
In working within this context, the first and most important lesson is to not get drawn into traps. In a videotaped message in 2004, Osama bin Laden explained his strategy with astonishing frankness. He termed it “provoke and bait”: “All we have to do is send two mujahedin . . . [and] raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘Al Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses.” His point has been well understood by ragtag terror groups across the world. With no apparent communication, collaboration, or further guidance from bin Laden, small outfits from Southeast Asia to North Africa to Europe now announce that they are part of Al Qaeda, and so inflate their own importance, bring global attention to their cause—and of course get America to come racing out to fight them. This kind of overreaction also makes the U.S. military presence and policies—its bombings, its collateral damage—the main issue. The local debate moves from terrorism to U.S. imperialism.
Consider the manner in which the United States started expanding its presence in Africa. The rhetoric that the Bush administration used was commendable. “We want to prevent problems from becoming crises, and crises from becoming catastrophes,” Theresa Whelan, the former deputy assistant defense secretary for African affairs, explained in an interview in 2007. “We have in our national interest that Africa is a stable continent.” Its solution, however, was the creation of a new military command for the continent, AFRICOM, with its own commander and staff. But as the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius perceptively asks, “Is the U.S. military the right instrument for the nation-building effort that AFRICOM apparently envisions? Will a larger U.S. military presence check terrorism and instability on the continent, or will it instead become a new magnet for anti-Americanism?” The United States has many interests in Africa, from keeping countries stable to checking China’s influence to preventing humanitarian tragedies. But is a military command the way to go about this? Or is this simply the response generated because this is how the U.S. government knows to respond—with a military command. The danger here is of wasted resources, a reaction to perceived American imperialism. But the deeper problem is conceptual. It is a misdiagnosis of the problem. “To the man who has a hammer,” Mark Twain wrote, “every problem looks like a nail.”
The United States should be thinking creatively and asymmetrically. This would allow it to capitalize on one of its key advantages. The United States has a much broader and deeper range of instruments than just its military. An American policy toward Africa, for example, that focused on building up our diplomatic corps, nation-building capacities, and technical assistance