Critical Studies on Terrorism

ISSN: 1753-9153 (Print) 1753-9161 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rter20

Lost cause: consequences and implications of the

war on terror

Paul Rogers

To cite this article: Paul Rogers (2013) Lost cause: consequences and implications of the war on
terror, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 6:1, 13-28, DOI: 10.1080/17539153.2013.765698

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2013.765698

Published online: 05 Apr 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2546

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rter20
Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2013
Vol. 6, No. 1, 13–28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2013.765698

ARTICLE
Lost cause: consequences and implications of the war on terror
Paul Rogers*

Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK

(Received 20 December 2012; final version received 4 January 2013)

By 2001, the al-Qaida movement had evolved into a transnational revolutionary move-
ment with an eschatological dimension, facilitating the 9/11 attacks to gain religious
support and incite a strong reaction. The Bush administration was particularly tough in
its response, terminating the Taliban regime and then declaring the right of pre-emp-
tion against a wider axis of evil, which led on to regime termination in Iraq and the
intended constraining of Iran. In the event, regime termination in Iraq and Afghanistan
resulted in protracted wars that were intensely costly in human and resource terms, and
Iranian influence actually increased. The al-Qaida movement was dispersed while being
transformed into a potent idea with little in the way of an organised structure, yet was
effective in catalysing movements from South Asia through the Middle East to sub-Sa-
haran Africa. Analyses of events in Iraq and Afghanistan point to deep misconceptions
over the potential for the use of military force and of imposed state building. After
more than a decade after 9/11, there has been a re-orientation away from large-scale
occupations towards more remote means of maintaining control, with an emphasis on
armed drones, special forces and privatised military companies. This approach appears
initially appropriate and attractive but may be as counterproductive as the previous
approach.
Keywords: Iraq; Iran; Afghanistan; Pakistan; al-Qaida; Bush; insurgency; 9/11
attacks; regime termination; security

Introduction
On 1 May 2003, President George W Bush gave a speech from the flight deck of the
US Navy’s aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, off the Californian coast, reporting on the
progress of the war in Iraq and the ongoing “war on terror” campaign against the al-Qaida
movement. Known as the “mission accomplished” speech because of a large banner
displayed behind the President, it was seen as a very positive report on progress made,
especially in Iraq. The context was that the United States had suffered an appalling attack
on 11 September 2001 and had responded vigorously against the al-Qaida movement and
its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. The Taliban regime had been terminated within three
months, and the military operations had then moved on to the wider “axis of evil” of
three states – Iraq, Iran and North Korea – with the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq being
the most significant. The termination of that regime had commenced six weeks before
the speech, and President Bush was able to report on impressive successes, including the
occupation of the capital city of Baghdad.

*Email: p.f.rogers@bradford.ac.uk

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

14 P. Rogers

In broad terms, it appeared by May 2003 that the United States and its coalition
partners were succeeding in countering the al-Qaida movement and two elements of the
wider axis of evil. The Taliban had been comprehensively defeated in Afghanistan, the
al-Qaida movement was thoroughly dispersed, and Iraq was in the process of being liber-
ated. Furthermore, it was confidently expected that both countries would make a transition
to pro-western democracies with very strong US influence, including long-term military
bases. An additional effect of this would be that Iran would now have a US military pres-
ence to its east (Afghanistan) and to its west (Iraq), as well as the powerful naval forces
of the US Fifth Fleet operating in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. It would thus
be thoroughly constrained. In essence, the disastrous impact of the 9/11 attacks had been
countered, and the United States had recovered and even increased its influence in the
Middle East and South Asia.
President Bush’s speech was actually rather more cautious than the “mission accom-
plished” banner might suggest. While pointing to the prowess of the US military in
responding to 9/11, he argued that the war on terror was not yet over and would involve
further action directed principally at the dispersed elements of the al-Qaida movement
wherever they might be found.1 Even so, the speech was broadly positive to the extent that
it expressed the firm belief that progress had been exceptionally strong.
Nearly a decade later, this sense of optimism is certainly not borne out by subsequent
events: the initial victory in Iraq was followed by a bitter insurgency and protracted inter-
communal violence leading to the deaths of over 100,000 people,2 injuries to hundreds of
thousands more, four million refugees and a massive economic burden. In Afghanistan,
what appeared to be a rapid process of regime termination turned into a protracted insur-
gency that is now into its second decade. While the original al-Qaida movement has been
much constrained, the ideas that it espoused have been taken up in the Horn of Africa,
Yemen, Nigeria, Mali and the North Caucasus, and paramilitary affiliates are prominent
in Iraq and Syria. This article is, therefore, an analysis of why the war on terror has had
results so different to those expected in May 2003 and goes on to examine the implications
of the outcomes in terms of the impact on attitudes to the use of military force, especially
the increased reliance on the “remote control” of security threats through the use of armed
drones, special forces and privatised military companies.
The article commences with an outline of the origins of the al-Qaida movement and its
development to the point of the 9/11 attacks, and follows this with a brief assessment of the
reasons for the Bush administration’s vigorous response. This is followed by an analysis of
the subsequent changes in the al-Qaida movement, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and
an overall assessment of their consequences, and a discussion of recent changes in military
responses to perceived threats from radical movements. It concludes by looking at these
changes in relation to trends in international security in the context of socio-economic divi-
sions, marginalisation and environmental constraints. Will the outcomes of the responses
to the 9/11 attacks serve to determine whether the security challenges likely to arise from
these trends will be met principally with military force or with more nuanced approaches
that addresses the challenge more directly?

The origins of the al-Qaida movement

Following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, an anti-occupation
insurgency evolved, which had the backing of external actors. The most significant regional
element was the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organisation in Pakistan driven
primarily by the need to counter Indian power by ensuring that Afghanistan provided a
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 15

degree of defence in depth. From a wider international perspective, the Soviet occupation
became a core feature of the final decade of the Cold War, with the United States at the
forefront of providing support for the Mujahidin insurgency.
While much of the Mujahidin motivation stemmed from nationalist and ethnic iden-
tity in resisting occupation, a powerful element was religious fervour and this linked, by
the mid-1980s, to an increasingly significant element of foreign paramilitaries entering
Afghanistan to aid the insurgency. These young men came from right across the Middle
East and Central Asia and included the Saudi Osama bin Laden and his close associate
Ayman al-Zawahiri from Egypt. Both had been influenced by the writings of Sayidd Qutb
and saw the expulsion of Soviet forces as a religious duty. With the collapse of the Soviet
occupation by 1988, many of the surviving foreign fighters returned to their own countries,
but bin Laden did so while seeing the Afghan success in two elements of a wider context –
it was the start of a more transnational renewal of Islam in a singularly puritanical form and
it demonstrated the power of religious motivation to destroy a superpower. While this lat-
ter element was an exaggeration, given the other contributors to the collapse of the Soviet
Union, it gave the new al-Qaida movement a sense of transnational potential.
In the early 1990s, the al-Qaida movement developed initially in Saudi Arabia and was
given an added boost by what was seen as the utterly unacceptable presence of uniformed
US military in the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places after the eviction of Iraqi forces from
neighbouring Kuwait (Lawrence 2005). Bin Laden was expelled from Saudi Arabia on the
grounds of being a security risk to the Royal House of Saud and moved to Khartoum and
thence back to Afghanistan where the Taliban movement was engaged in a bitter civil war
against the Northern Alliance warlords as it sought to unify the country under a rigorous
form of Islamist governance. Bin Laden’s role was to aid the process of bringing in dedi-
cated paramilitaries to support the Taliban, but there had already been an extension to the
movement’s activities elsewhere, including attacks on US forces in Saudi Arabia. These
culminated in the bombing of US diplomatic missions in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and
the attack on a US Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, in Aden harbour in 2000.
By 2000, the al-Qaida movement was operating a number of training camps in
Afghanistan in support of the Taliban, but it had also evolved into a loose transnational
phenomenon. It could correctly be envisaged as an unusual revolutionary movement with
an eschatological dimension in that it sought a radical re-ordering of society based on a
religious belief. This dimension meant that it had a timescale for success that went beyond
the lifetimes of its supporters, a rare revolutionary dimension with implications for those
who might oppose it.
The movement’s primary focus was on the Middle East and its more immediate aims
involved terminating unacceptable regimes that were not properly Islamist, especially the
House of Saud and the Mubarak regime in Egypt. These comprised the “near enemy” and
also included the Zionist entity of Israel, but the movement also sought to support other
movements such as the Chechen rebels and the Moslem separatists in southern Thailand.
Beyond these was the “far enemy” of the United States, seen as the main global threat to
an Islamist future by virtue of its support for Israel and for regimes such as the House of
Saud.
Achieving the aims of regime termination and the limiting of US influence in the region
might take decades, but beyond these lay the much longer term task of creating a worldwide
Islamist Caliphate, which was the ultimate aim of the movement. This necessarily meant
destroying or at least crippling the United States, a task which was seen as possible, given
that the al-Qaida movement had seen itself as part of a conflict in Afghanistan that had
already destroyed one superpower.
16 P. Rogers

In this context, the proposal of the Frankfurt group to take the war to the far enemy was
attractive. Attacks in New York and Washington would be visceral shocks to the United
States and would serve two important functions. The first would be to demonstrate to the
worldwide Islamic world, the Umma, that al-Qaida was an international force of great
ability and worthy of support. While very few Moslems agreed with its rigid aims, the
belief was that a perception of Islam in retreat would be answered by attacking the far
enemy and would engender sympathy and even some support for the cause. The second
function would be to incite a massive response from the United States, to stir up a hornet’s
nest of anger that would involve military intervention in Afghanistan. Given the time of
year and the onset of winter, it was implausible that the US military could move in to
occupy Afghanistan and terminate the Taliban regime until the following Spring, giving
time to prepare for a post-occupation insurgency that would eventually, perhaps over many
years, wear down the United States in the early 2000s in a manner similar to the fate of the
Soviet Union in the 1980s.

The United States response and its implications

The response of the Bush administration was robust in the extreme, leading to wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. In part, this was due to the impact of the attacks but also related to
the specific political climate of the new administration. On the attacks themselves, these
atrocities were far more galvanising than Pearl Harbour in 1941 in that they were against
civilians, were conducted by a terrorist group rather than a belligerent state and were wit-
nessed in real-time via television. Concerning the Bush administration, though, there were
distinctive features that helped determine the vigorous nature of the response.
President George W Bush had been elected in November 2000 on the narrowest of
Electoral College votes and with fewer actual votes than his opponent, Senator Al Gore. He
was widely expected to run an administration that would seek consensus, but other factors
worked against this. During the late 1990s, a powerful lobby group within the Republican
Party had coalesced around the concept of the New American Century. This was much
influenced by neo-conservative tendencies and was rooted in the view that the United States
had a mission to provide world leadership in the early twenty-first century. In part, it was
in response to the perceived failure of the Clinton administration to react to the collapse of
the Soviet bloc, which was seen as a unique opportunity for US influence to expand, but
the outlook went beyond this.
In the view of the supporters of the New American Century project, the failure of
the Soviet system and the partial adoption of free market thinking within China was a
conclusive vindication of the free market capitalism that was at the heart of US power.
Consequently, the United States had a duty to provide world leadership, a duty that had a
quasi-religious dimension in the sense that this was close to being an ordained mission.
It was in many ways a development of the “city on the hill” ideal of the United States,
although supported strongly by a business outlook that saw it as of fundamental value to
wealth creation and expansion.
This outlook took root in the early months of the Bush administration with key sup-
porters including Vice President Dick Cheney, his Chief of Staff Lewis Libby, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, as well as
John Bolton at the State Department. Moreover, this confluence of opinion within the Bush
administration had the effect of US foreign and security policy following a unilateralist
track, there being a pervasive view that the United States should not be held back on its
path to global leadership by multilateral agreements that might not fully be in its interests.
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 17

There were many examples in the early months of 2001. They included withdrawal from the
Kyoto Climate Change Protocols, planned withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty and opposition to the proposed International Criminal Court and the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty. By July 2001, there was some anxiety within western European capitals
at this trend in US politics, but among its supporters there was considerable optimism. The
United States might be starting to act like a global hegemon, but commentators such as
Krauthammer (2001) could claim that this was the valued exercise of leadership in what
might be seen as a thoroughly benign imperium.
In relation specifically to security policy, one core element of this thinking was the
role of the United States in the Middle East. This had three elements: strong support for
Israel, the recognition of the importance of western Gulf States as sources of oil and gas
and the belief that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had to be faced down. Prior to
Bush’s election, the Iraq issue, in particular, had been a feature of persistent lobbying for
several years and was an area of fundamental disagreement with the Clinton administration
(Ritchie and Rogers 2006).
An element of the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz approach to international security was the idea
of “war lite” – that advances in stand-off weaponry, expeditionary warfare and the use
of special forces meant that deploying tens of thousands of ground troops overseas was a
feature typical of past eras, whether they be Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1970s or
Iraq in 1991. This did much to influence the course of regime termination in Afghanistan,
with a rapid and vigorous campaign being pursued in October and November 2001 that had
three components: the intense use of air power, deployment of special forces and Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives on the ground, and the re-arming and re-supply of the
Northern Alliance group of warlords to act as surrogate ground troops against the Taliban
and al-Qaida.
The result of this action, in contrast to the alternative of a six-month build-up of US
ground forces through Pakistan, was the rapid capitulation of the Taliban, the termination
of the regime and the dispersal of the al-Qaida training camps. By early December 2001,
fighting was limited to the southeast of the country, there was a conviction that the al-Qaida
movement was in comprehensive retreat and that the Afghanistan would make a slow but
steady transition to a peaceful pro-western state, with much of the aid presumed to come
from European coalition partners. Thus, the United States had responded to the visceral
shock of the 9/11 attacks with considerable force and international leadership.
In late January 2002, President George W Bush delivered his first State of the Union
Address to Congress to huge applause and used the occasion to extend the war on terror
against the al-Qaida movement to a much wider concept of determined opposition to a
cluster of rogue states – part of an “axis of evil” that supported terrorism and sought to
develop weapons of mass destruction. While Iran and North Korea were significant mem-
bers of this axis, it was already clear that Iraq was the prime candidate. Moreover, Bush
made clear in his Graduation Address at the West Point Military Academy in June 2002 that
the United States had the right to pre-empt future threats to its security (Bush 2002), and
this commenced with the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime in March and April
2003.

The post-9/11 evolution of the al-Qaida movement

By the end of Bush’s first term, it was becoming apparent that in the three major areas of
activity, the al-Qaida movement, Iraq and Afghanistan, the trends that seemed to have been
established by the time of the “mission accomplished” speech were no longer continuing
18 P. Rogers

as expected. The al-Qaida movement had certainly been dispersed and hugely limited in
its central organisation, but groups linked loosely to the movement were active across the
world. During the course of 2002 alone, incidents included an attack on Christian wor-
shippers in a diplomatic district in Islamabad, the killing of 14 German tourists visiting a
synagogue at Djerba in Tunisia and the killing of 11 French naval technicians in Karachi.
The US consulate in that same city was bombed in June and the Limburg tanker was
attacked in the Arabian Sea in October. That same month a devastating bomb attack on
the Sari nightclub in Bali killed 202 people and injured 300, and one month later a hotel at
Kikambala on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast was attacked killing 11. That hotel was popular
with Israeli tourists and on the same day an attempt was made to shoot down an Israeli
tourist jet taking off from Mombasa Airport.
Attacks continued into 2003 and included the multiple bombing of four western-related
targets in Casablanca killing 39 people, and the multiple bombing of western compounds
in Riyadh, killing 29. In August 2003, a bomb attack at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta killed
13 people and injured over 140, and in November two synagogues, the HSBC building
and the British Consulate in Istanbul were all bombed killing 51 people and injuring over
600. This pattern of attacks on western and Israeli targets continued in 2004, starting in
March with multiple attacks on the Atocha rail terminal in Madrid and commuter trains,
killing 200 people and injuring over 1000. Jakarta was again hit in September 2004 with
the bombing of the Australian Embassy, killing 11 people, and the following month there
were multiple attacks against tourist camps and the Taba Hilton in Sinai, sites popular with
Israeli tourists.
Over the next three years, attacks continued across the world, again aimed primarily at
western and Israeli targets. They included the London transport bombings of July 2005, and
bombings of tourist hotels and a market in Sharm al Sheikh the same month, and an attack
on the USS Kearsage in Aqaba harbour and the bombing of three western hotels in Amman,
Jordan, later in the year. According to the Global Terrorism Index for 2012 (Institute for
Economics and Peace 2012), terror incidents worldwide peaked in 2007 and remained at
a plateau for the following five years. Incidents directly related to the al-Qaida movement
have declined markedly. The killing of bin Laden may have had an impact, even though
he played a minimal role in the movement towards the end of his life, and the extensive if
controversial use of armed drones by the US military and the CIA in northwest Pakistan
undoubtedly reduced the numbers of experienced paramilitary leaders in the movement.
Even so, a notable feature of the period from 2007 to 2012 has been the increase in
activities of movements loosely affiliated in the sense of their sharing an idea of revolu-
tionary change rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam. Most of these movements are
orientated to their own territories rather than placing an emphasis on a transnational strug-
gle. They are thus less concerned with the “far enemy” of the United States, but have a
potent effect on their own regions. Examples include the continuing activities of Sunni
paramilitaries in Iraq, with attacks directed at the al-Maliki government and at Shi’a com-
munities, and al-Qaida-linked groups in Yemen that have become sufficiently coherent to
be able to control territory. In Somalia, the Shabab movement has experienced reversals
in 2012, but further down the east African coast, in Kenya and Tanzania, radical Islamist
groups are demanding governmental action against the relative marginalisation of some
coastal communities.
The most significant developments have been in western Africa, the North Caucasus
and Syria. In Nigeria, the Boko Haram movement has grown rapidly since 2009 to con-
stitute a major threat to the security of the northern part of the country. The Nigerian
government has responded with the use of considerable force by army and police units,
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 19

but this has been singularly counterproductive and has strengthened popular support for
the movement, which has links with smaller groups in neighbouring Niger (International
Institute for Strategic Studies 2012a). To the northwest, a Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali
in early 2012 was overtaken by a radical Islamist movement, primarily centred on the Anser
Dine paramilitary group, which gained control of more than half of the country, leading
to calls for intervention by military forces of the Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS) backed by western states, especially France (Binnie 2012a).
In the North Caucasus, the Russian authorities have conducted a substantial countert-
errorism campaign against an al-Qaida-affiliated group known as the Caucasus Emirate.
This movement had historical connections with the Chechen rebels in the late 1990s and
is best described as a network of like-minded groups with the common aim of establish-
ing some kind of caliphate in a cluster of Russian republics across the North Caucasus.
According to an assessment from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (2012b),
the active paramilitary members of the Caucasus Emirates may number barely a thousand,
but since its establishment in 2007 it has been involved in over 2200 violent incidents that
have led to the deaths of 1550 state officials and 400 civilians. Russian attempts to contain
the movement have a particular saliency with the 2014 Winter Olympic Games due to be
held in Sochi in the North Caucasus.
In Syria, the non-violent protests against the Assad regime in early 2011 were sup-
pressed with considerable force leading to an increasingly potent counterreaction that
evolved from a rebellion into an insurgency and, by mid-2012, into a civil war. While
the forces opposed to the Assad regime have been disorganised, they have had consider-
able support from western Gulf States, notably Saudi Arabia, and the Assad regime has
been supported directly by Iran and indirectly by Russia. The Syrian conflict therefore has
a strong proxy element, making a resolution deeply problematic, but a key feature has
been the steady increase in the activities of radical Islamist paramilitaries within the rebel
forces. They have included dedicated young men travelling to Syria from across the region
to support the actions against the Assad regime and have involved the frequent use of mar-
tyr bombings. At the time of writing (late 2012), these elements within the rebel forces
have proved to be some of the most effective forces acting against the regime and they
are likely to have significant influence in a post-Assad Syria (Arango, Barnard, and Saad
2012).
If we therefore look more generally at the changing nature of the al-Qaida movement
since 9/11, three trends become apparent. The first concerns the nature of the movement.
From the perception of the Bush administration, al-Qaida was seen as a markedly struc-
tured entity in the form of a hierarchical organisation with Osama bin Laden as the leader
and Ayman al-Zawahiri as his key deputy. It is debateable how firmly structured al-Qaida
ever was, but by the end of Bush’s second term, it was largely dispersed with a limited
capacity for central organisation. Secondly, from the late 1990s, al-Qaida was certainly a
movement, even if much dispersed and having elements of a consortium, franchise and
network. It is clear that many of the attacks listed above were undertaken by individuals or
groups that embraced the al-Qaida world view but operated as separate entities, often with
little connection with the leadership. At the same time, they did constitute a transnational
movement in a very loose sense and the most important aspect of this was that much of
the targeting of attacks in the early and mid-2000s was directed against western and Israeli
interests, whether in Turkey, Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Spain, the United
Kingdom or elsewhere. Thus, the al-Qaida idea of a far enemy was very much a part of the
movement. Moreover, the level of activity in the period of 2001 to 2006 was actually much
higher than in the previous five years.
20 P. Rogers

The final trend is more recent and involves two related aspects. The first is that attacks
on what might be termed that far enemy – particularly the United States and western
European countries – have declined in intensity. This may well be due to a much higher
level of security given that there have been a number of failed attempts, as well as arrests
and trials on charges of conspiracy. The second aspect of the recent trend has been what
might be termed the proliferation of the idea, and this includes the Caucasus, Yemen, Iraq,
Somalia, Nigeria, Mali and Syria. Some of the groups involved, such as Boko Haram in
Nigeria and Anser Dine in Mali may have only the loosest connection with al-Qaida, but
the key issue is that the al-Qaida vision retains a potency that does not appear to have
diminished.
It has, though, suffered one major set back that has nothing to do with the pursuit of
the war on terror over the past 11 years. This is the evolution of the Arab Awakening, not
least with fundamental political change in Egypt and Tunisia, but also reforms in countries
such as Morocco. The Awakening is rooted in non-violent political change towards more
democratic governance and is radically different from the methods and intended outcomes
of revolutionary change sought by the al-Qaida movement. As such, if the Arab Awakening
progresses successfully in the coming years, it will be a considerable obstacle to the move-
ment achieving violent regime change across the Middle East and northern Africa. Against
this, if the Awakening fails, especially if new governments cannot meet the social and
economic expectations of their populations, then the more radical alternative offered by
the al-Qaida movement and its offshoots could become singularly attractive. Thus, much
depends on the outcome of processes that have little to do with western actions against
al-Qaida, the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime in the early 2000s.

The Iraq war in context

While the recent evolution of the al-Qaida idea hardly relates to the Iraq and Afghan Wars,
both of these conflicts have been influential in the development of the movement and even
more so in influencing current trends in western conceptions of international security.
By May 2003, at the time of the “mission accomplished” speech, it was already start-
ing to become apparent that an insurgency was developing. Even as US troops had entered
Baghdad in early April, supply lines were under attack between Basra and Baghdad and
the first suicide attack on an US unit had taken place. As the war in Iraq developed over
the next two years, the Taliban re-emerged as a major insurgency in Afghanistan and an
expansion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces commenced. Taking the
two conflicts together, the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University estimated
that by mid-2011, the overall death toll in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was at least
225,000, there were 7.8 million refugees in and from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and
that the wars would eventually cost some $4000 billion, funded principally by borrowing.
Interest payments through to mid-2011 were already $185 billion and a further expenditure
of $1000 billion was likely by 2020.3
Major problems developed for the United States and its coalition partners, initially in
Iraq, and were clearly evident by late 2003. As the conflict progressed, it hugely exacer-
bated inter-confessional tensions, with the Sunni-Shi’a divide being at the centre of this,
even if other confessional groups such as the Christians suffered greatly. Across the Islamic
world, there was considerable anger and outright opposition to what was seen as the foreign
occupation of a significant Arab/Islamic state. Even if the Saddam Hussein regime was
widely opposed, there was still a strong sense that the occupation of Iraq was part of a US
attempt to exert excessive control over the region. This outlook was strengthened by reports
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 21

that the United States planned four large military bases in Iraq, and partly by the power of
the Coalition Provisional Authority under the direction of Paul Bremer and answerable to
the Pentagon rather than the State Department. This strengthened the impression of occupa-
tion, but three further factors should be considered in understanding the internal opposition
within Iraq and the wider opposition across the Middle East and beyond.
The first was the experience of US infantry and marines in the early months. The young
men and women saw the Iraq operation as liberating a subject people from a dictator-
ship that was integrally involved in the 9/11 attacks. Rather than being welcomed with
flowers and cheering, they quickly faced entrenched paramilitaries operating in an urban
environment. To the US troops, they were terrorists and a key part of the war against the
perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, President Bush himself was arguing that it was
better for the United States to be fighting the enemy in Iraq than in Manhattan or down-
town Washington. Furthermore, by June 2003, US troops were taking serious casualties,
the impact of which was, paradoxically, made worse by positive improvements in battlefield
protection and medicine. In the Vietnam War, the ratio of US troops killed to injured was
about 1:3, but improvements in body armour, trauma control, rapid casualty evacuation
and subsequent medical care meant that the ratio in Iraq was closer to 1:7. While hugely
welcome in one respect, this meant that far more young soldiers and marines were surviv-
ing with very serious injuries to face, throat and groin, as well as loss of limbs. In such
circumstances, and facing an enemy seen as terrorists, US forces and their coalition part-
ners persistently relied on their overwhelming firepower in response to attacks, including
punitive responses.
In one example reported by an experienced embedded journalist, the Washington Post’s
Pamela Constable, marines rescued comrades in a supply convoy caught in an ambush in
Fallujah in April 2004. The Marines were extracted with injuries but no deaths and then:

Just before dawn Wednesday . . . AC-130 Spectre gunships launched a punitive devastating
raid over a six-block area around the spot where the convoy was attacked, firing dozens of
artillery shells that shook the city and lit up the sky. Marine officials said the area was virtually
destroyed and that no further insurgent activity has been seen there. (Constable 2004)

From the perspective of local marine commanders, their fellow marines had been ambushed
by terrorists, not paramilitaries defending their city. Moreover, this was still less than three
years after the 9/11 atrocities. Nevertheless, this was a punitive raid – retribution in the
form of the destruction of a densely packed area of a crowded city. The number of civilian
casualties from the raid is not known but this one example of many gives a sense of the
US predicament and frustration. It may be seen as having been an inevitable result of the
problems faced as the insurgency grew in strength, but had the effect of greatly increasing
opposition to the United States.
It is certainly the case that as the war evolved, the tactics of the more radical opposition,
especially those associated with al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, were frequently brutal in the
extreme. Furthermore, many of the actions of the more extreme Sunni paramilitaries were
directed against the Shi’a majority, and as the war progressed, the majority of the civilians
killed were as a result of inter-confessional violence that developed principally between
these two confessional communities. At the same time, the United States and its coalition
partners were occupying the country and under the relevant Geneva Convention they were
charged with maintaining internal order. This they singularly failed to do.
The second factor relates to the extent of support for the coalition. By mid-2003, it was
already obvious that the United States, as the coalition leader, was facing a severe problem
22 P. Rogers

of a rapidly developing urban insurgency. One substantial part of Iraq, the Kurdish north
and northeast, was relatively calm, but had most of a US division assigned to maintain
security and prevent the insurgency evolving in that direction. While this was a significant
task, involving many thousands of troops, it was far from being the most important part of
the military task of controlling Iraq. There was therefore a need to bring in other troops,
either from an existing coalition partner or by extending that partnership, thus freeing up a
US division to reinforce operation in central Iraq, especially the greater Baghdad area.
This apparently simple solution was, however, complicated. Most states with substan-
tial military forces orientate their forces for defence of their own state, not for major
operations overseas. Small scale commitments of up to a thousand troops in support of
UN peace-keeping operations may be possible, but the ability to deploy a reinforced divi-
sion of perhaps 16,000 troops is relatively rare. Of countries able to do that in mid-2003, the
United Kingdom was already committed in southern Iraq, and France and Germany were
not willing to contribute and neither would Turkey. Russia and China were not acceptable
to Washington and Pakistan had too many internal and regional security pre-occupations.
One country, India, was in a position to support the coalition and the nationalist govern-
ment under Prime Minister Vajpayee was supportive. From that government’s perspective,
if India was to play a significant role it would demonstrate its military capabilities which
would be of value in its difficult relations with Pakistan and China and would also earn
considerable support in Washington.
The problem was that in terms of domestic public opinion the war was deeply unpopular
and opinion polls persistently showed a substantial majority against any Indian commit-
ment to a US-led coalition.4 In many ways, this represented a view typical across much
of the world away from the states that were part of the coalition, not that there was not
considerable controversy in some of those states. For Mr Vajpayee, the circumstances
were particularly difficult in that his party faced elections in two of India’s states later
in 2003 and a General Election the following year. The Indian government did not there-
fore feel able to support the United States. The effect of this was to make the United States
even more dominant in the war in Iraq and in the following four years many of the coalition
partners withdrew their own military forces from Iraq.
The final factor is again fully understandable from a US military perspective, but had
unexpected consequences. By late 2003, the insurgency was becoming very serious and the
United States could not depend on reinforcements from allies. Senior military then took
what was on the face of it a reasonable step of seeking substantial advice and technical
support from Israel, its one close ally that had decades of experience in urban warfare and
population control in the region. Relations between the US military and the Israeli Defence
Forces were already close, with much of the Israeli military equipment being of US origin
or co-developed with US arms companies, but the Iraq predicament made relations much
closer. In December 2003, the head of the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command
and other senior military spent time in Israel developing a process of close coordination
with their Israeli counterparts and from then on there was extensive sharing of training
methods and also provision of Israeli equipment likely to aid counterinsurgency operations
in Iraq.5 In one example, the US Army Corps of Engineers built a mock Arab town in the
Negev Desert for use by Israeli and US units in training for urban warfare.6
It must be appreciated that from the perspective of the United States this was a pro-
cess of collaboration that made eminent good sense and might well be a substantial aid
to controlling the increasing violence in Iraq. From the perspective of those opposing the
coalition, especially the more radical groups related to the al-Qaida movement, this was
clear evidence of the nature of the far enemy’s links with the Zionist entity. This was a
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 23

gift to the movement’s propagandists since they could develop a very clear narrative – that
the war in Iraq was a Crusader/Zionist conspiracy to take over a state in the heart of the
Islamic world. In many ways, Iraq was far more significant than Afghanistan, even if the
Saddam Hussein regime had in no way been supported by the al-Qaida movement. Indeed,
there was an added dimension in that within Islamic history, Baghdad had been the centre
of the most notable and successful of the Caliphates of the early Islamic era. The Abbasid
Caliphate of more than a thousand years ago stretched across most of the modern day
Middle East. It may have been far more benign and civilised than any caliphate that might
form part of al-Qaida’s world view, but the important point is that it was a very well-known
Islamic entity and its capital was now occupied by crusaders supported by Zionists. It was
a persuasive and much used narrative.
By 2008, the war in Iraq was easing, partly due to the temporary deployment of addi-
tional US troops, and Barack Obama’s election campaign in November 2008 saw Iraq as
an unpopular war from which the United States should extricate itself. The Obama admin-
istration set a date of the end of 2011 for the withdrawal of combat troops, although there
was an assumption that some thousands of US troops would stay in the country, primar-
ily in a training role but also to ensure US interests were maintained. In the event, the
Iraqi government was not prepared to allow US troops immunity from Iraqi laws and as a
result, almost all US troops left the country, leaving a small number to provide diplomatic
protection and others to work on training and support programmes. Given that Iraq was
essentially controlled by a government drawing its support from the Shi’a majority, one of
the most remarkable outcomes of the entire war was that Iranian influence in the country
was much boosted, the opposite of the expected outcome back in 2003.

Afghanistan and Pakistan

If the Iran factor at the end of the Iraq War was a problem for US policy in the Middle East,
the war itself is more significant for the boost it gave to the al-Qaida movement. One aim of
the 9/11 attacks had been to draw the United States into a war in Afghanistan but, instead, it
became embroiled as the military occupier of a state that had a far greater resonance across
the Islamic world. Even so, while developments in Afghanistan appeared to be positive for
the US and its coalition partners, the longer term outcome was very different and there were
indications of problems in the first nine months. The initial assumption was that the Taliban
had been defeated and the al-Qaida movement dispersed. There is certainly some truth in
the latter, although the movement was always much more than a centralised hierarchical
organisation. What was also mistaken was to see the termination of the Taliban regime as
the end of that entity; Taliban paramilitaries simply melted away, many of them with their
weapons and supplies intact. There were indications of a continuing problem in some of the
operations conducted by US troops in southeast Afghanistan during 2002, most notably in
Operation Anaconda when US forces took serious casualties during a military sweep that
encountered unexpectedly high levels of opposition (Constable 2002).
Such incidents were not sufficient to encourage the Bush administration to recognise
the possibility of a Taliban resurgence, since it was already focused intently on the coming
war with Iraq. From its perspective, Afghanistan was set on a path towards pro-western sta-
bility that would be underwritten primarily by European allies, although the United States
would maintain an interest while also consolidating the basing arrangements it had made
with several Central Asian republics. At the time (early 2002), Afghan and UN analysts
were pointing to the risk of a security vacuum developing, and of the need for a sub-
stantial stabilisation force to ensure security while the massive problem of post-conflict
24 P. Rogers

reconstruction was addressed. In the event, NATO eventually sponsored an International

Security Assistance Force, but this only numbered about 5000 troops. This was sufficient
to ensure a degree of security in Kabul and a few large towns, but had little or no effect
on the rural areas where most Afghans lived, including the Pashtun south from where the
Taliban had drawn much of its support.
Two other factors were to make it easier for Taliban and other armed opposition groups
to begin to regain influence by late 2005. One was chronic corruption and maladministra-
tion on the part of the Karzai government, including the diversion of billions of dollars
of aid away from their intended purposes. This made the government deeply unpopular,
especially in the south, and meant that when Taliban groups re-emerged, they were wel-
comed for the stability they brought to districts, in spite of the rigidity of the Islamist
attitudes. The second factor was the role of Pakistan, in that it was relatively easy for
Afghan Taliban to operate at times across the border. While Islamist paramilitaries opposed
to the Islamabad government were a continuing problem for the Pakistani Army and cost it
many lives, those paramilitary groups focused on Afghanistan, especially the Taliban, were
favoured in Islamabad as providing a means of maintaining influence in Afghanistan. From
the Pakistani government’s perspective, maintaining such influence has been a continuing
priority since the founding of the state in 1947, since it is a territory providing a degree of
defence in depth from its far more powerful neighbour to the east – India.
By early 2006, the Taliban movement and other armed opposition groups (AOGs),
especially the Haqqani network, were gaining influence across much of southern and east-
ern Afghanistan and this resulted in a substantial increase in the size of the International
Security Assistance Force. By the end of 2008, there were close to 100,000 foreign troops
in the country, mostly western, and even this number was having difficulty controlling an
evolving insurgency. US forces made up two-thirds of the total, with that of the United
Kingdom being the second largest contingent, but the Bush administration was already
seeing this as inadequate and his putative successor, Senator John McCain, was advocating
a surge of at least 30,000 additional troops as part of his presidential election campaigning.
Barack Obama fought the 2008 election on the basis that Iraq was a “bad war” and
that US forces should be withdrawn, whereas Afghanistan was a “good war”, principally
because of the direct link, through the al-Qaida movement, with the 9/11 attacks. After
his election victory, his administration took many months to determine its precise policy
on the Afghan War before opting for a troop surge broadly in line with that advocated
by McCain. There was one subtle and significant difference in that the McCain surge was
predicated on achieving victory over the Taliban and AOGs followed by a slow drawing
down of US force levels, whereas the Obama administration did not see a victory over
the Taliban/AOG forces as possible. Instead, the surge was intended to bring sufficient
military advantage over the Taliban/AOG forces to ensure a negotiated withdrawal that
would leave the Afghan government strong enough to maintain control, albeit with an
inevitable contribution to governance coming from Taliban/AOG elements.
Perhaps most significant of all was the subsequent decision of the Obama adminis-
tration to fix a timetable for US troops withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the end of
2014 being the deadline for withdrawal of regular combat troops. While this might leave in
place some thousands of military personnel to engage in supportive training and security
operations with the Afghan National Army, there would also be a strong element of spe-
cial forces together with the extensive use of reconnaissance and armed drones to ensure
that al-Qaida-linked paramilitary groups would not return to the country. Furthermore,
Afghanistan would continue to serve as a base for operations against paramilitary groups
antagonistic to US interests that were operating in Pakistan.
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 25

By the end of 2012, withdrawal of US forces was already substantially underway with
all of the “surge” units having left the country. Taliban/AOG activity during the winter
period of 2012–13 was proving to be relatively low and this was presented as proof of
progress in the handover of security duties to the Afghan National Army under the con-
trol of the Karzai administration. Based on past experience of Taliban/AOG tactics, it was
readily arguable that the low level of activity was because there was little point in conduct-
ing military operations against coalition forces when these were for the most part leaving
the country within two years.

Remote control
By the end of 2012, 11 years after the 9/11 attacks and two decades after the initial forma-
tion of al-Qaida, the impact of the unexpected outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled
with the continued impact of Islamist paramilitary groups in South Asia, the Middle East
and northern and western Africa meant that a re-consideration of counterterror strategy
was highly likely. This might have evolved more slowly if Mitt Romney had been elected
in 2012, but Barack Obama’s victory meant that trends that were already developing would
likely be consolidated.
Towards the end of the first term, the Obama administration was already overseeing
a move away from “boots on the ground” to a less direct way of maintaining control.
This was partly in reaction to the outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also because
of the success of new developments in military technology, especially the deployment
of powerfully armed and long endurance unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs).
By 2010, these armed drones were being used widely in Afghanistan and Pakistan and
less commonly in Yemen and Somalia. In combination with much greater use of special
forces (Priest and Arkin 2011; Miller and Tate 2012) and privatised military companies
(The Economist 2012), they represented a different approach to counterinsurgency and
counterterror operations from large-scale military deployments.
Such a “remote control” approach did not mean the end of more conventional inter-
ventions, and NATO’s operations in Libya during 2011 illustrated this with a high level
of dependence on air power combined with the largely unpublicised use of special forces.
But the Obama administration, in particular, was deeply cautious of wider involvement in
Libya, a caution that extended to its approach to the civil war in Syria and the potential for
military action against Iran.
There are three caveats concerning the idea that remote control is the transformative
military narrative after the failure of the war on terror. One is that it is not new, even
if technological developments such as UCAVs make it more useable. The use of special
forces and many other forms of surreptitious warfare were common features of military
postures during the closing phases of the colonial era and were also commonly used by
the United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in South Asia during the Cold
War. The second is that the re-orientation of the US military posture towards the Asia
Pacific region is rooted primarily in conventional naval and air power. Even so, in relation
to responding to paramilitary groups, radical and violent political movements, failing states
and unacceptable autocracies, the gaining and maintaining of control without large scale
occupations is now the far more likely practice.
The third caveat concerns the nature of reactions to the use of armed drones and other
forms of remote control. The widespread use of drones in Pakistan has resulted in a cli-
mate of fear stemming partly from the drones themselves, but also from reprisals against
those suspected of providing information for drone operations (Walsh 2012), as well as
26 P. Rogers

increasing the bitter anti-American mood that pervades Pakistani politics. In addition to the
United States, Israel has long been a major developer and user of drones (Rodman 2010),
but Iran, too, has invested heavily in this technology, passing some of it on to Hezbollah
paramilitary units in southern Lebanon (Binnie 2012b). Thus, while this approach may
seem initially attractive, its longer term effects may prove to be counterproductive to the
interests of the United States and its allies.

Relevance to international security

The focus of this article is on the specific conflicts that followed the 9/11 atrocities, but it
is appropriate to discuss briefly the issue of changing approaches to counterinsurgency and
counterterrorism in relation to future international security challenges. There is a strong
argument that these will be dominated by two broad international trends (Rogers 2010).
One is the persistent failure of the current economic system to deliver economic justice.
The variable patterns of economic growth of the past three decades have resulted in deep
disparities that are transnational and have seen a concentration of wealth in a large minor-
ity; in broad terms, about one fifth of the global population now has between 80% and
90% of the wealth, whether measured in terms of income or household wealth. This is
a trend that seems deeply entrenched and even the financial downturns that followed the
2008 have not led to any fundamental reforms of the current system. Moreover, this trend
has been paralleled by impressive and welcome improvements in education and commu-
nications, but these also lead to a much greater awareness of marginalisation. There are
many instances where this has resulted in deep resentment, anger and action. It underpins
much of the pressure for the Arab Awakening and is illustrated by the deeply entrenched
neo-Maoist Naxalite rebellion in India, persistent social unrest in China and, to an extent,
helps account for the Indignado and Occupy movements.
On its own, this socio-economic predicament has the potential to cause major prob-
lems for the world’s more elite communities, but it will be hugely compounded by the
overarching problem of climate disruption. While this phenomenon gets little attention
from political leaderships, it is becoming abundantly obvious that climate disruption is
accelerating and asymmetric, with profound impacts likely on more marginalised societies
across the tropics and sub-tropics. The combination of socio-economic divisions and cli-
mate disruption is recognised in some military circles as a fundamental security issue in the
coming decades, but the tendency, perhaps inevitably, is to see this as a challenge that must
be countered by intense efforts to maintain stability. Little or no attention is paid to the
underlying problem, not least because it requires unpopular short-term actions to counter
longer term trends.

Conclusion
The 9/11 attacks were appalling in their own right but their wider significance was bound
up with the state of US politics at the time. The Bush administration’s neo-conservative
tendencies, especially the influence of the idea of a New American Century, meant that
the attacks were seen as a fundamental threat not just to the United States but to the neo-
liberal world order which the United States was determined to lead. One response would
have been to see the attacks as monstrous examples of transnational criminality and to
use every means to bring those behind the perpetrators to justice, however long that might
take. Such an approach, advocated by a few analysts at the time (Bello 2001; Elworthy
and Rogers 2001), had no chance of acceptance in the Bush administration. But what took
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 27

the response well beyond military action directed primarily against the al-Qaida movement
was the decision to embrace the much wider concept of an axis of evil and then to engage
in regime termination in Iraq and the constraining of Iran. This was, in a sense, a “war
too far”, and resulted in a deeply controversial occupation of a major Islamic state that
gave a boost to radical Islamists. It also moved the focus from Afghanistan, enabling the
Taliban and AOGs to re-group and develop active resistance culminating in a long and
bitter insurgency that continues.
More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, a thoroughly dispersed yet still potent idea
rooted in the al-Qaida outlook is present across the Middle East, northern Africa and South
Asia and even retains a limited yet persistent global following. More generally, radical
movements that are by no means focused on Islam draw on a narrative that builds from
perceptions of marginalisation that show little sign of easing given current world economic
trends.
The United States and coalition failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in great
caution over the future deployment of large numbers of ground troops in pursuit of inter-
national security challenges and have led instead to a greater reliance on less direct and
obvious uses of force. Much of the focus is now on armed drones, special forces, priva-
tised military units and other relatively low profile means of control. Expeditionary warfare
and the use of air power is not ruled out, but is far less prominent in responding to secu-
rity issues. While this may be seen as a necessary adjustment in the face of the failure
of established military practices, it is arguable that it is as inappropriate a response to
global security challenges as was the pursuit of a war on terror. If the underlying issues
of international insecurity relate to socio-economic divisions and fundamental problems of
environmental limitations, recourse to the “remote control” of disorderly problems is little
more than a case of treating the symptoms rather than the causes. It took a decade to fully
recognise the failings of the war on terror and it will be deeply dismaying if it takes another
decade to learn that the changes made in the wake of that failure are equally inappropriate
and require, instead, the development of thinking on sustainable security that places far
more emphasis on causes than control.7

Journal editor’s note

This article was first presented as the Fourth Annual Critical Studies on Terrorism Lecture,
an event inaugurated by the journal to celebrate scholars who have made a significant con-
tribution to critical terrorism studies. Professor Rogers’ lecture was presented at “Terrorism
and Peace and Conflict Studies: Investigating the Crossroad”, the BISA Critical Studies on
Terrorism Working Group (CSTWG) Annual Conference, 10–11 September 2012, organ-
ised by the Conflict Analysis Research Centre, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. The
editors are grateful to Professor Rogers for accepting our invitation and to the conference
organisers for including it in the programme.

Notes
1. The full text of the speech is available at: http://middleeast.about.com/od/usmideastpolicy/a/
me080921a.htm.
2. By December 2012, the Iraq Body Count group was listing the death toll at between 110,931 and
121,221 (www.iraqbodycount.org).
3. See the report from the Eisenhower Research Project of the Watson Institute for International
Studies at Brown University, Providence RI, June 2011, available at www.costsofwar.org.
4. Opinion polls at this time showed opposition to deployment ranging from 69% to 87% of those
polled.
28 P. Rogers

5. There were very few reports of this linkage in the western media, one exception being: Barbara
Opall-Rome, “US-Israel Army Brass Swap Tactics, Secret Meeting Focuses on Anti-Terror War,
FCS Technology”, Defense News, 15 December 2003. See also, Barbara Opall-Rome, “Israeli
Arms, Gear Aid US Troops”, Defense News, 30 March 2004.
6. The town is Baladia and the context of its construction and function is described in Rogers 2007
7. For more detailed consideration of thinking on sustainable security, see the work of the Oxford
Research Group: www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/ssp.

Notes on contributor
Paul Rogers is Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University in the United Kingdom and a
consultant to Oxford Research Group. He can be contacted at p.f.rogers@bradford.ac.uk, or in
Twitter: @ProfPRogers.

References
Arango, T., A. Barnard, and H. Saad. 2012. “Syrian Rebels Tied to Al Qaeda Play Key Role in War.”
New York Times, December 8.
Bello, W. 2001. “Endless War?” Focus on the Global South. Accessed January 3, 2013. www.
focusweb.org/publications/2001/endless_war.html.
Binnie, J. 2012a. “Mali Intervention Planning Intensifies.” Jane’s Defense Weekly, October 24.
Binnie, J. 2012b. “Rise of the Pahphal – Iran’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.” Jane’s Defence Weekly,
November 21.
Bush, G. W. 2002. Graduation Speech at West Point. Accessed January 3, 2013. http://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html.
Constable, P. 2002. “Night Under Fire: ‘a Lot of People Got Hit’.” Washington Post, March 9.
Constable, P. 2004. “A Wrong Turn, Chaos and a Rescue.” Washington Post, April 15.
Elworthy, S., and P. Rogers. 2001. “The United States, Europe and the Majority World After
September 11.” Briefing Paper, Oxford Research Group, October.
Institute for Economics and Peace. 2012. Global Terrorism Index: Capturing the Impact of
Terrorism for the Last Decade. New York, December 4. Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www.
visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/2012-Global-Terrorism-Index-Report1.pdf.
International Institute for Strategic Studies. 2012a. Extremism Spreads Across West Africa and
the Sahel. London, October 31. Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www.iiss.org/EasySiteWeb/
getresource.axd?AssetID=70418&type=full&servicetype=Attachment.
International Institute for Strategic Studies. 2012b. Jihad in Russia: The Caucasus Emirate.
Accessed January 3, 2013. http://www.iiss.org/EasySiteWeb/getresource.axd?AssetID=71744&
type=full&servicetype=Attachment.
Krauthammer, C. 2001. “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto and the New American Unilateraliam.”
The Weekly Standard, June 4.
Lawrence, B. 2005. “Introduction.” In Messages to the World – the Statements of Osama Bin Laden,
edited by B. Lawrence, xiii. London: Verso.
Miller, G., and J., Tate. 2012. “The CIRA’s Secret Security Force Emerges from the Shadows.”
Washington Post, December 27.
Priest, D., and W. M. Arkin. 2011. “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special
Operations Command.” Washington Post, September 2.
Ritchie, N., and P. Rogers. 2006. The Political Road to War with Iraq: Bush, 9/11 and the Drive to
Overthrow Saddam Hussein. Abingdon: Routledge.
Rodman, D. 2010. “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the Service of the Israel Air Force: ‘They will Soar
on Wings of Eagles’.” Middle East Review of International Affairs 14 (3). Accessed January 3,
2013. http://www.gloria-center.org/2010/09/rodman-2010-09-07/.
Rogers, P. 2007. “A Tale of Two Towns.” Open Democracy, June 21. Accessed January 3, 2013.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflicts/global_security/tale_two_towns.
Rogers, P. 2010. Losing Control: Global Security in the Twenty-First Century. London: Pluto Press.
The Economist. 2012. “Bullets for Hire”, The Economist, November 17.
Walsh, D. 2012. “Drone War Spurs Militants to Deadly Reprisals.” New York Times, December 29.