End the "War on Terror" and Talk to the Taliban

President Barack Obama pledged in his first TV interview—with the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya—that America under his watch would "listen with respect and not dictate" to the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has further announced that this country will no longer just throw around its military might but will pursue a "smart power" approach by tempering the use of hard weaponry with the "soft power" of persuasion and cultural attraction. Or, as Madame Secretary's husband Bill has put it, America will now lead through the power of example instead of the example of power.
The first exceedingly complex test of Obama's smart power strategy will be how to end George W. Bush's misguided "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, keeping al-Qaida at bay without being swallowed by the quagmire of tribal politics. An array of experts from New Delhi to Paris offers their views in this section.     

Beyond the War on Terror: Into the Fifth Generation of War and Conflict

Fifth generation warfare has arrived and is irreversibly changing the character and nature of human conflict. It confronts the United States with the evolving strategic dilemma of not only dealing with the War on Terror, but of simultaneously crafting strategies that look beyond military preparedness for past wars and embrace the perspective of national preparedness for the spectrum of future conflicts. This article uses four essential elements of war—the new domains of conflict, the changing nature of adversaries, the changing nature of objectives, and the changing nature of force—to build a generational typology of war and conflict that informs the characteristics of fifth generation warfare. The resultant model produces two outcomes: First, it demonstrates how recent events such as the rise of computer hackers, the 2001 anthrax and the 2003–2004 ricin attacks, the 2004 Madrid bombings, and the emergence of Al Qaeda demonstrate characteristics of fifth generation warfare. Second, it illustrates the way in which these events are unique indicators of a future in which non-state entities are increasingly able to wage war on equal footing with nation-states. The article concludes that the United States must embrace fifth generation warfare if it is to successfully confront these threats that have taken on new and heretofore unimagined forms in the postmodern era of war.     

Terrorism Where Terror Is Not: Australian and New Zealand Terrorism Compared

Despite many commonalities in national security priorities, Australia and New Zealand approach the threat of terrorism quite differently. Both had twentieth-century manifestations of domestic terrorism which were generally downplayed. The emergence of jihadist-inspired threats globally have affected Australia much more than New Zealand, and Australian counterterrorism strategy has developed significantly since 9/11. New Zealand has watched global events so far untouched by any jihadist threat, and has implemented few effective counterterrorism measures. The reasons for the differing experience, it is contended here, are the varying historical perceptions of threat, and consequent differing approaches each country has taken to mitigate perceived threat.     

A Leviathan Rejuvenated: Surveillance, Money Laundering, and the War on Terror

Efforts to prevent and preempt further terrorist attacks in the United States and other developed countries have intruded into many spheres of public and private life. This article provides a short assessment of the redeployment of anti-money laundering regimes to combat the financing of terrorism. This expansion of financial surveillance is directed by international organizations and domestic legislation in the belief that terrorists and their financiers may be found, identified and detained. After providing background to the anti-money laundering regime, the article looks at the domestic and extraterritorial application of the USA PATRIOT Act. One conclusion of this analysis finds that a financial panopticon has coalesced out of the wide range of financial and non-financial businesses now required to report “suspicious financial activity.”     

Counterterrorism Effectiveness to Jihadists in Western Europe and the United States: We Are Losing the War on Terror

A comparative analysis of Islamic extremism post-9/11 to 2015 and the effectiveness of the counterterrorism (CT) authorities to counter it in both Western Europe and the United States was conducted. Four measures of effectiveness revealed that 2010–2015 saw a gradual increase in jihadi attacks and in casualties emanating from these attacks, and more jihadists, foreign fighters, and material supporters. Additionally, 2013–2015 saw a 22 percent reduction both in Western Europe and the U.S. CT agencies' ability to counter Islamic extremism. We are losing the War on Terror and our citizens are less safe than they were six years ago. Further analysis revealed that singleton jihadists: (1) were much harder than group-based jihadists to uncover, (2) have been increasing since 2009, and (3) have generated over 70 percent of all jihadi violence. Finally, numerous similarities exist between Western Europe and the United States with respect to jihadism in their homelands and their respective CT effectiveness, indicating close cross-Atlantic CT collaboration since 9/11. This in-depth analysis provides essential threat/hazard information to security, law enforcement, intelligence, and policymaking personnel and the greater homeland security communities.     

Party Structure,Information, and Coalition Durability: The Relevance of NATO in the Global War on Terror

Using the test cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, this study illustrates how alliances work to mitigate the conflicting frames that party structure and media access provide in the Global War on Terror, which leads to more cohesiveness in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)–led coalition in Afghanistan as opposed to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. The approach utilized here extends the theory on alliance capability and uncertainty by arguing that alliances reduce uncertainty among member states on a strategic objective. This is particularly relevant when examining asymmetric, limited conflicts, where party structures and media access can work to disseminate conflicting frames to a domestic populace, who then can pressure their leader to withdraw from a coalition. The implications of these findings lend support to the continued relevance of NATO in the twenty-first-century security arena.     

When Is Democracy Better for Economic Performance and when Is It Not: the Interaction Between Polity and Structural Factors

Is democracy or autocracy better for economic performance? Why do autocracies exhibit a greater variation in growth rate than democracies? We argue that democracy??s effects on growth are conditional on structural factors. Democracy is superior to autocracy only when structural factors, such as external threats or natural resource intensity, are not favorable to growth. Conversely, where structural factors are conducive to growth, autocracies are likely to perform better or equally well as democracies. By incorporating institutional and structural incentives into the equation, we answer the questions regarding the relative strengths and weaknesses of political regimes in pursing economic development. The empirical evidence examining postwar data significantly supports the hypotheses.     

Going to the Source: Why Al Qaeda's Financial Network Is Likely to Withstand the Current War on Terrorist Financing

On 24 September 2001, President Bush announced the first stage of the War on Terrorism with an attack against the terrorist financial infrastructure. Since then, the impact of this attack on Al Qaeda's ability to operate has been minimal, for three reasons. First, Al Qaeda has built a strong network of financiers and operatives who are both frugally minded and business savvy. As a result, terrorist finances are often hidden in legitimate and illegitimate businesses and disguised as commodities and cash. Second, Al Qaeda has learned to effectively leverage the global financial system of capital markets. Small financial transfers, underregulated Islamic banking networks and informal transfer systems throughout the world make it almost impossible to stop Al Qaeda from moving money. Third, Al Qaeda has built a significant base of Islamic charities in Saudi Arabia with international divisions that have not been scrutinized or controlled by the regime. As a result, Al Qaeda's sophisticated financial network may be able to sustain international efforts to disrupt it. Financial regulations imposed to reduce terrorist financing must be applied more broadly and be supported by significant resources. An improvement in the war on terrorist financing requires better international coordination, more effective use of financial regulations, and regulating the Saudi Arabian charity structure.‐     

From Munich to Boston,and from Theater to Social Media: The Evolutionary Landscape of World Sporting Terror

Modern terrorist attacks are usually characterized by intentionally extreme public displays of massive violence to get wide propagation, courtesy of the media. This article uses large-scale, world sporting events, from the 1972 Munich massacre to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing to document and analyze how terror acts grew and acclimatized into a reality in which the symbiotic, massive linkage between two gigantic entities—sports and the media—allows terrorism to prosper.     

Democracy without democratic values: A rejoinder to Welzel and Inglehart

In reply to Welzel and Inglehart in this issue, we deploy three lines of criticism. First, we argue that their newly invented construct “effective democracy” is conceptually and empirically flawed. Second, we show that their results are highly sensitive to model specification. Regardless of the time period, their supportive evidence vanishes if a more pertinent measure of democracy is used instead of measures based on the absence of corruption, if a broader index of socioeconomic modernization is controlled for, and if their compound index of emancipative values is replaced by its core component; liberty aspirations. Third, we find that emancipative values are not a coherent syndrome at the individual level within countries, rendering the causal mechanism linking these values to democracy through collective action unintelligible. We conclude that democratic values are not a robust determinant of democratization. Jan Teorell is associate professor of political science at Lund University. He has published on intra-party politics, social capital and political participation, and, together with Axel Hadenius, is now involved in a project on the determinants of democratization. Axel Hadenius is professor of political science at Lund University. He is the author ofDemocracy and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) andInstitutions and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).     

China: From Democracy Wall to the Shopping Mall and Back

Who would have thought that tainted pet food and toys would threaten to unravel the authoritarian export model of Chinese growth that the brutal Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 was meant to secure?