"Warlordism"
and the War on Terrorism
By Ken Menkhaus
December 26, 2001
The U.S government's announced intention to
broaden the war on terrorism beyond Afghanistan has triggered
growing concern that other important U.S. foreign policy goals
and principles will be subordinated in the process.
The line of reasoning goes something like this. To build an
effective set of alliances against terrorist networks, the U.S.
will need to direct considerable levels of economic and military
aid to governments that share our agenda. Those governments will
exploit the urgency of our mission by demanding sizable
concessions in exchange for their cooperation. U.S. pressure for
democratization, respect for human rights, anti-corruption
measures, economic liberalization, and other cherished agendas
will be quietly shelved so as not to irritate needed allies who
find those policies nettlesome. In some instances, our friends
will engage in reprehensible behavior, and we will be forced to
look the other way because national security imperatives demand
it.
Concerns about the inevitable "quid pro quo" that
will define our alliances in the broader war on terrorism are
not unwarranted. We had ample experience with these unpleasant
tradeoffs as part of our containment policies in the cold war.
More recently, we watched as numerous third world countries
exacted significant economic and political concessions from the
U.S. in exchange for their support of Operation Desert Storm
against Iraq. It is hardly unreasonable to worry that a
protracted war on terrorism will again lead to concessions to
unpalatable third world leaders whose only redeeming feature is
a shared commitment to combating Islamic terrorism.
That's the bad news. It will come as no comfort, then, to
hear that we'll be lucky indeed if our worst problem is the
tradeoffs inherent in "quid pro quo" relationships. A
far more insidious problem, one which lurks in the chaotic
corners of many failed states where our war on terrorism is
likely to lead us, is the "quid pro no" scenario. That
is, we will be drawn into providing military and economic aid to
"allies" who are happy to help us fight a war on
terrorism--but who have no intention of seeing that war won. The
war on terrorism, for some, is to be a war without end.
One of the unpleasant realities of contemporary conflict is
that in many parts of the third world, wars are no longer being
fought to win, but rather are fought to create and maintain
environments of lawlessness and violence from which certain
groups and individuals profiteer. Over the course of the 1990s,
this phenomenon has come to be called "warlordism." In
Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Colombia, Angola, Somalia, Sudan,
and elsewhere, war is waged mainly to enable the protagonists on
all sides to loot and profit from extralegal control of trade in
everything from diamonds to timber to diverted food relief. The
key to these protracted armed conflicts is that, despite public
appearances, neither rebel nor "government" forces
have an interest in ending the war, and even less of an interest
in a return to rule of law. In some instances governments and
rebels even collude to perpetuate the wars from which they
profit.
As it happens, a number of these failed states are located in
regions where Islamic terrorist cells like al-Qaeda might
relocate or expand operations. The U.S. is likely, then, to find
itself stepping into neighborhoods where war--including a war on
terrorism--is viewed by many as an opportunity, not a problem.
Leaders of some of these failed states have already been
quick to appreciate the new and tantalizing opportunities for
windfall profits that a war on terrorism could bring. The
self-declared "transitional national government" of
Somalia, for instance, quickly established an
"anti-terrorist task force" following September 11 and
has repeatedly called for external aid to prevent that failed
state from being misused as a safe haven for terrorists. Never
mind that the transitional authorities have been unable even to
open the seaport and airport of Mogadishu, much less monitor and
combat terrorism countrywide. For these leaders of failed
states, the war on terrorism promises the return of cold war
levels of foreign aid and all the opportunities for personal
enrichment that entails.
And make no mistake: Leaders in these failed states are no
fools. They understand that the war on terrorism is a meal
ticket. They will be quick to calculate that a successful
campaign against terrorism in their country will lead only to a
return to marginalization, and an end to strategically driven
foreign aid. They may have been unable to prevent the end of the
cold war, for which some in the third world have an ironic
nostalgia, but they can do much to insure that a war against
terrorism is never quite won. Antiterrorist campaigns in these
countries may come to constitute a shell game, not an end game.
We are fighting the war on terrorism to win, but must not
presume that that logic prevails elsewhere. In the context of
"post-modern warfare" that exists in many of the
failed states in the third world, many will share our enthusiasm
to wage the war, but few will be eager to end it.
(Dr. Ken Menkhaus <kemenkhaus@davidson.edu>
is associate professor of political science at Davidson College,
NC. He is a specialist on the Horn of Africa and has served as a
consultant to the UN and the U.S. government.)
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