The media rushes in where even presidents fear to tread. Ten years after 9/11, President Obama is trying to gingerly extricate the US from the rhetoric of the “war on terror.” One day after the Delhi High Court attacks newspaper headlines in India fume: Terrorists Strike Yet Again, At Will: Is Anyone Serious About This War? If three months after a blast at the high court, there were still no CCTVs, that is something the government should be taken to task for. If the government promised a slew of measures after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and is dragging its feet on many of them, that’s something the government should be held accountable for. If there were intelligence failures that could have averted the deadly blasts, that’s something the government should answer for. But is a War on Terror the answer? Words matter and for a nation shocked by one spectacular attack, as the US was on 9/11, or by the numbing chain of attacks, as India is after 11/7, 26/11, 13/7, “war on terror” has a reassuring musculature to it. President Bush understood that when he told a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001: Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. The war on terror soon gave the US its Axis of Evil. It became a portmanteau term, a black hole within whose lightless depths lurked everything from Abu Ghraib tapes to extraordinary rendition to secret prisons, $4 trillion in US spending and 225,000 lives. The lesson of 9/11 is this. It’s easy to declare a war on terror, to draw a line in the sand that says you’re either with us or against us, to thunder that you will smoke the terrorists out of their caves. It’s much harder to end it. Even conventional wars defy photo-op endings as Bush discovered when he stood on that aircraft carrier with the Mission Accomplished sign behind him in 2003. This is not about liberal squeamishness at the notion of war. It just doesn’t make sense. [caption id=“attachment_79112” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The war on terror has become America’s Frankenstein monster. Reuters”]  [/caption] It doesn’t work. Ten years after Bush launched that war, Osama bin Laden might be dead. But two-thirds of the Axis of Evil is alive and well. The Arab Spring happened but it was not the domino effect of the toppling of Saddam as the neo-cons had hoped. And the hydra-headed enemy of complex allegiances and myriad grievances that Bush stirred up with his war bedevil America’s reputation and strain its resources, even as Obama tries to stuff that war on terror back into Afghanistan. But that genie has long escaped that bottle. It confuses the issue. As Marc O Hedahl points out in his essay Stop Calling it the War on Terrorism, there are metaphorical wars like the War on AIDS or a War on Poverty. Then there are real wars like the War on Iraq or the War on Afghanistan. A War on Terrorism creates a peculiar hybrid – both metaphorical and traditional with ever-shifting boundaries. The libertarian Cato Institute pointed out back in 2004 “war on terrorism” implies “the use of military force as a primary instrument of waging the war. But traditional military operations – such as Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan — will be the exception rather than the rule.” It’s impractical. A war is a specific act that a nation undertakes. It comes with rules of engagement. The US quickly found itself struggling to figure out what rules applied or didn’t apply to the “enemy combatants” it picked up in Afghanistan and Yemen and Pakistan, men who wore no uniforms, who answered to no governments. It sent the US into the moral morass of secret prisons, military tribunals in Guantanamo in Cuba. It has ventured into shaky legal ground with its own Supreme Court, into the arms of the Patriot Act which the Congress rubber-stamped in a panic without reading the fine print. And now it’s saddled with prisoners it doesn’t want anymore but no country wants either. It’s endless. How does one ever declare a War on Terror as over? As the IRA told Margaret Thatcher after a botched assassination attempt: “Remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” In a country as diverse as India where there are separatist groups and Maoists insurgencies, where terrorists come from across the border and are home-grown as well, there will always be someone ready to take up arms for a cause. Each of them will have to be tackled, some with carrots, some with sticks. What is the point of one war to bind them all? A war needs an enemy with an identifiable face. The war on terror is a war with shadows. That’s why Obama tried to dial back Bush’s grand sweep by saying “this is not a global war against a tactic – terrorism – or a religion – Islam. We are at war with a specific network, al-Qaeda, and its terrorist affiliates who support efforts to attack the United States, our allies, and partners.” He was not just being some head-in-the-clouds peace-and-brotherhood liberal. Simply put, Obama as a politician who needs to seek re-election, wants a war that is winnable, manageable, practical. He is not shirking the fight. He just wants the enemy to have a real name. He wants actual benchmarks of progress as opposed to Bush’s speechwriter David Frum who, in his book An End to Evil: How to win the war on Terrorism, basically pinpointed evil as the root of terrorism and made it the business of the United States to eradicate evil. [fpgallery id=206] But unfortunately for Obama, all his talk about “new partnerships with emerging centres of influence” and seeking to “delegitimise the use of terrorism and to isolate those who carry it out” will never quite have the ring of the War on Terror. That has become a brand, a well-marketed one at that, and America is in some sense its prisoner, even as Obama distances himself from it. The bombs in Delhi High Court and before that in Mumbai shouldn’t just be dismissed with the usual pablum of “We shall not succumb” and bureaucratic paper shuffling among the mandarins of Delhi. It requires resolve. It requires an approach that’s more proactive than reactive. It may need more resources than we have given it before. But does that make it a war? The war on terror has become America’s Frankenstein monster. India should think twice about jumping into its rhetorical embrace.
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