Destroying the jihadist enterprise

Joshua Sinia:

How do we win the conflict against radical Islamic terrorist groups and their supporters? Who are these groups, what is their ideology and operational code? What are the metrics to measure the effectiveness of our response? These are some of the questions that Brian Michael Jenkins attempts to answer in his important book, "Unconquerable Nation."
Mr. Jenkins is one of America's veteran experts on counterterrorism, having established the country's first major terrorism studies program at the RAND think tank in 1972.
Observing the changes in terrorism since the 1970s, Mr. Jenkins points out that in those early days terrorist conflicts were primarily regional problems, with attacks causing relatively few casualties. At that time, the U.S. homeland was not threatened.
Today, however, groups such as al Qaeda are cellular and decentralized, operate on the ground and on the Internet, target their adversaries transnationally and seek to have "a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead."
The book's main contribution is Mr. Jenkins' formulation of a counterterrorism strategy to destroy what he terms the "jihadist enterprise." This enterprise is not a single organization (e.g., al Qaeda) but a worldwide "marketplace" of jihadists in which these groupings either spontaneously, or under the direction of al Qaeda's operatives, organize to achieve what they conceive to be their path of "glory." Thus, different measures are required to respond to each segment of the jihadi marketplace.
Although he does not explicitly enumerate them, eight strategic principles can be discerned. These include conserving resources for a long war, waging an effective political warfare campaign, breaking the cycle of jihadism, maintaining international cooperation, pre-empting attempts by terrorists to launch attacks involving weapons of mass destruction, retaliating "in kind" against any state that provides WMD to a terrorist group, rebuilding Afghanistan and, in Iraq, finding a way to reduce "insurgent, sectarian and predatory criminal violence to a level that permits social and political progress."
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Among the eight principles, the "real battle" is ideological, with political warfare a crucial component in America's arsenal. Mr. Jenkins writes, "It is not enough to outgun the jihadists. We must destroy their appeal, halt their recruiting. It is not enough to kill or apprehend individual members. Al Qaeda's jihadist ideology must be delegitimized and discredited."
Mr. Jenkins acknowledges the need to "understand the sentiments of the Islamic world, their antipathies toward us and toward the terrorist fanatics who threaten them as well." But what is more important, he argues, is to engage them in a political warfare campaign that "comprises aggressive tactics aimed at the fringes of the population, where personal discontent and spiritual devotion turn to violent expression."
It is here where political warfare aims to address the entire "jihadist cycle, from entry to exit," by impeding recruitment into terrorism, inducing defections and getting detainees to renounce jihad.
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What is needed is a political war room approach to the jihadist war effort. If you consider the media battle, the US is always several days behind the enemies OODA loop. In politics every charge that is unanswered is deemed admitted and if it is not answered in the same news cycle it is too late. The same thing is happening in the war where we allow the nemy to make bogus charges which take a week or more for response by which time the enemy has moved on to new bogus charges. The US needs a James Carville type in chrage of the media war room for the war against the jihadist.