Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism (Hardcover)

~ Charles Peña (Author) "President Bush claims that even before 9/11 the al Qaeda threat was "obvious..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, President Bush, Saddam Hussein (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...Mr. Peña’s book deserves to be widely read and carefully considered." -- Amb. Edward Peck, former chief of mission in Iraq and deputy director of the Reagan cabinet’s task force on terrorism

"...a great deal of research about the war against al Qaeda...an accessible and interesting book..." -- Peter Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst, fellow of the New America Foundation, and author of The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader

"A brilliant and incisive demolition of the misguided strategy that the Bush administration concocted in the wake of 9/11. -- Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War

"…Not only does Charles Peña understand the nature of modern Islamic terrorism…but he understands how to tackle it…" -- Jason Burke, chief reporter for the London Observer and author of Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror and Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam

"…Peña brings his formidable analytic skills to bear in assessing where we stand in the fight against al Qaeda…" -- Roger Cressey, former White House counterterrorism official and NBC News terrorism analyst

Product Description

According to President Bush, "the American people are safer" as a result of invading Iraq. True, Saddam Hussein has been removed from power. But al Qaeda, the group that planned and carried out the attacks on September 11, remains at large. Meanwhile, the White House has conceded that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks.

Charles Peña argues that the war in Iraq is but one misstep in the Bush administration’s "global war on terror." Terrorism is simply a tactic, however, not an enemy. Trying to eradicate it is a quixotic quest that does not focus on those responsible for 9/11. Instead, the national security strategy should consist of three central elements: establishing homeland security against further attacks; dismantling the al Qaeda terrorist network; and enacting a foreign policy that does not attract new al Qaeda terrorists.

This approach requires restructuring U.S. forces and ending Cold War–era commitments that distract from the current, pressing threat. It also requires ameliorating the negative consequences of an interventionist U.S. foreign policy, which creates incentives and opportunities for terrorists to target the United States.

If we misdiagnose al Qaeda’s motivations or focus military efforts on the wrong targets, then we run the risk that the war against the al Qaeda terrorist threat (and the radical Islamic ideology it represents) will become a broader war against the Islamic world that could last generations and cost countless lives. With a foreword by Michael Scheuer, the bestselling author of Imperial Hubris.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Potomac Books Inc. (April 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1574889656
• ISBN-13: 978-1574889659
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,318,455 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 'Long war' a tragic misstep, August 25, 2006

By	David Isenberg - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HH12Aa01.html

Winning the Un-War by Charles Pena

Reviewed by David Isenberg

Not all worthwhile points are new ones. Sometimes the most useful thing one can do is remind people of certain undeniable truths, especially when the powers that be are doing their best to obfuscate or deny them.

In this task Charles Pena, a former director of defense-policy studies at the Cato Institute, succeeds admirably in Winning the Un-War. His thesis is both simple and powerfully valid. He argues that the "global war on terrorism", which nowadays the administration of US President George W Bush simply prefers to call (shades of Nineteen Eighty-Four) the "long war", is a tragic misstep. Pena is not the first one to note that, as terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, fighting a war against it is futile. But he does amass an arsenal of evidence detailing how it has made the United States less, not more, safe.

Pena has an eye for detail. The book is crammed with it. Obviously he spent a long time Web-surfing while doing his research. As such, the first few chapters dealing with the threat of al-Qaeda and the lackluster US response to it, the distraction of the Iraq war and the costs it imposed cover much of the material that has been covered in previous books. To his credit, Pena acknowledges this up front. Yet he manages to flesh out insights that rarely, if ever, are mentioned. For example, in talking about the numbers of US troops needed for the United States to crush the insurgency, he writes:

Historically, the force ratio required for imposing stability and security is 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants; this is the ratio the British - often acknowledged as the most experienced practitioners of such operations - deployed for more than a decade in Malaysia and more than 25 years in Northern Ireland. With a population of nearly 25 million people, to meet the same standard in Iraq would require a force of 500,000 troops for perhaps a decade longer.

That is the same line of thought, albeit more detailed, that caused the Bush White House to force former army chief of staff Eric Shinseki into early retirement when he testified before Congress in early 2003.

Pena also has a flair for language, as you might expect from an author whose acknowledged inspirations range from Sting to Yogi Berra. Operation Iraqi Freedom is a "catastrophic success". Or: "Removing 70,000 US troops from Germany and South Korea is the right thing to do. But like the proverbial joke about the demise of 100 lawyers at the bottom of the sea, it's just a good start." Or, commenting on the US lack of focus for waging war on terrorism, "It is as if America is still the little Dutch boy trying to plug all the holes in the dike with his fingers."

He writes that the "war on terrorism" is the "un-war" because it is unlike any previous war the US has fought. Because it is a different war it requires a different paradigm. But, sad to say, although fortunately Pena does, the United States has not yet made that shift.

One of the strengths of this book is in Chapter 4 where he details what the Pentagon is spending money on and how most of that is totally inappropriate for the war at hand. This is both an educational and a sad chapter. It is educational because of the wealth of detail it supplies on intellectually bankrupt Pentagon acquisition programs and sad because it shows how clueless the United States is in fighting al-Qaeda. Pena accurately points out that in the long haul this war will not be won by reliance on military forces. And yet the US persists in using the Pentagon as if it is the only tool in the toolbox.

The most useful part of the book is Chapter 6, "Tao of Strategy", in which he outlines his policy prescriptions. While this chapter clearly shows the influence of his days at the libertarian Cato Institute, its essence can't be said too often. Simply put, it comes down to this: it is America's actions in the world, not its ideology, that creates enemies. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda hate the US because of what it does, not because of who Americans are. To paraphrase Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion, for every US foreign-policy action in the Arab and Islamic world there is an unpredictable, but almost inevitable, reaction.

As Pena writes: "The problems of US foreign policy in the Islamic world will not be repaired by a better communications or public-reactions or public-diplomacy effort. Muslims see US foreign policy for exactly what it is. A better foreign policy - not better spin - is what is needed. Deeds, not words, are what matters."

Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism by Charles Pena. Potomac Books Inc, April 2006, ISBN: 1574889656. Price $27.95, pages 241.

David Isenberg is a senior research analyst at the British American Security Information Council, a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, and an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, Washington. These views are his own.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A critique of "Winning the Un-War", August 16, 2006

By	Jared Hubbard (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The following is an in-depth review of this book. But for the very abbreviated version: It's a good book with a few shortcomings. A good read though with some great strategies for America.

The Critique

Charles Pena's new book on American strategy in the face of al Qaeda offers a solid plan for defeating America's enemy, but suffers from a few shortcomings. Overall, however, the plan of focusing on al Qaeda, of using Special Forces to capture and kill the leadership while simultaneously removing the motivation behind the terrorist attacks is a solid one. Our nation's leaders would do well to read this book and take heed of Mr. Pena's advice.

Writing and Editing Comments

Before delving into Mr. Pena's arguments, there are a few shortcomings with the writing and editing of the book that we should cover. The first few chapters rely too heavily on quotes from political leaders, sometimes with five or more direct quotes on a single page. While this works well as evidence, the reader would be better served by one or two quotes getting directly to the point, and backed up by additional cites in footnotes or endnotes, followed by the analysis of the quote. It takes nothing away from Mr. Pena's analysis, but would serve to make the first few chapters more readable.
The second quibbling point is on Mr. Pena's tortured analogy of al Qaeda to quantum physics. Mr. Pena spends several paragraphs describing the wave/particle duality of light before going on to talk about the organizational structure of al Qaeda. But while light is both a wave and a particle at the same time, al Qaeda is not both a structured hierarchical organization and a distributed nodal network at the same time. Al Qaeda is simply a distributed nodal network, with the only true leadership that occurs being an ideological leadership. Again, this does not affect Mr. Pena's analysis of al Qaeda, but it does serve to confuse the reader with this tortured analogy. The use of other analogies, especially focusing on eastern theology, is somewhat better in that the analogy itself is shorter. But I still cannot understand how al Qaeda is composed of both yin and yang. When using analogies in general, it would seem better to compare something that is not generally understood (al Qaeda) with something that is commonly understood by the reader (not usually eastern religions or quantum physics). But of course all of these objections are minor and we should move on to a more in depth discussion of Mr. Pena's analysis of al Qaeda and American policy.

America's Focus

Mr. Pena's book contains one major assumption upon which the whole book and argumentation are based. That assumption is that al Qaeda is the foremost threat to America. While some may take this as doctrine, others do not, and Mr. Pena does not do a sufficient job backing up this assumption. Let us take, for example, al Qaeda's attacks directly on American interests in the last two decades :
1. World Trade Center - 1993 (unsuccessful)
2. African Embassies -1998
3. USS Cole - 2000
4. 9/11 - 2001
All of them were of course devastating and reprehensible, but the only one that had the effect of doing real damage to America was 9/11. And yet, five years later, truly not much has changed in America. The change was greater in New York itself, but five years later they are still haggling over the WTC site. And while the 3,000 deaths in the attack is tragic, it pales in comparison to the more than 42,000 that die every single year in auto accidents in America.
Al Qaeda may be the only group out there that actually has the wherewithal to attack America, but even their most devastating attack by no means brought America down or even threatened to do so. It's far more devastating effect was not the immediate deaths or impact on the economy, but the changes that it produced in America's foreign policy, which have generated additional support for our enemies and far fewer friends for America.
The truth is that al Qaeda is not an actual threat to America or the American way of life, but they are a threat to American power and influence in the world, and bring that fight to American soil. As such, they deserve to be hunted down and destroyed, but we should do so in the context of a broader campaign to increase America's power and influence.
America today is the most powerful nation the earth has ever seen. The only current international threat still comes from the nuclear arsenals of Russia and China, which are the only groups able to actually destroy America itself. But we have successfully used deterrence to minimize the risk from those countries. The biggest threat to America today is that, through bad leadership, we misuse our power and influence and cause it to decline. This would allow other state and non-state entities to arise and threaten not only our dominance in world affairs, but our very country. Thus, while it is good to consider America as a positive influence on the world, we should look at America's power and influence in world affairs as a strong protector of our freedoms and our democracy.
While many of Mr. Pena's suggestions are excellent as to defeating al Qaeda, he seems to believe that this conflict is more about the protection of the "homeland" than about the protection of American supremacy. It is not the "homeland" that al Qaeda is after, it is American supremacy itself. Yielding that supremacy to al Qaeda may temporarily protect the homeland, but it will lead to a lessening of American interests abroad. As successful Presidents over the past century have recognized, a peaceful and prosperous world leads to a peaceful and prosperous America. I will discuss some strategies for defeating al Qaeda while simultaneously maintaining and expanding American power and influence later, but first let us discuss al Qaeda itself in more depth.

Nature of the Beast

Mr. Pena does an excellent job at stating what al Qaeda's goals and ambitions are. He also reiterates that it is not America that al Qaeda hates, but America's effects in the Islamic world. This is true, and not stated often enough. Al Qaeda is not some evil demon from the pits that we must slay for the goodness of the world. Al Qaeda is instead a group of human beings with ambition and an ideology to back up that ambition. Their ambition is the reform (revolution) of the Muslim world to return it to the "pure" state as when it was led by caliphs. Their ideology is that anyone who interferes with this ambition is not a true Muslim and so is an obstacle in their path. They also have a less stringent regard for either their own lives or the lives of others, especially non-Muslims, in the world.
These ambitions and ideologies put al Qaeda into direct conflict with America, which by its power and influence acts to either maintain the status quo in the middle east (with all of the assorted authoritarian unpleasantness) or to push for increased democracy and improved freedoms (as we have, rather unsuccessfully, done in Iraq). So al Qaeda and the United States are simply two groups with different ambitions and ideologies that compete for power on the world stage. America already has vast power and influence while al Qaeda is attempting to gain its own power and influence. Because of the power differential involved in this competition, one of the only rational choices for al Qaeda to accomplish its ambitions is to conduct asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is a term used often in the connotation of Vietnam to describe how a small, mobile, ideologically committed force used surprise, terror, and propaganda to defeat the largest military power in the world.
Just as with Vietnam, al Qaeda does not have to militarily defeat the United States (nor could it). They must simply win the propaganda campaign. They use terrorism to accomplish this. This is because for every atrocious act that they commit, the United States (or their own local governments) cracks down. These crack downs usually accompany oppression of some sort because the terrorists are mixed in among the local population. Oppression breeds resentment and creates more recruits for al Qaeda who then uses those recruits for more atrocious acts. And thus the cycle continues, with al Qaeda strengthening with every iteration. So Mr. Pena is absolutely right in saying that our continued presence in the Middle East, and especially our occupation of Iraq, merely leads to additional recruits.
But what Mr. Pena does not focus on enough is that al Qaeda is essentially a guerilla group. Their genius is that they are one of the first of such groups to truly go global . While most guerillas are local fighters battling local governments, al Qaeda is a global organization battling the global superpower. Their ability to go global has been aided by international transport and communication. Understanding al Qaeda as a guerilla organization is helpful though because al Qaeda relies on popular support. Without friends and associates to hide them, or without friendly local mosques to recruit, al Qaeda would not be able to function. Mr. Pena is absolutely right that while the leadership is important, it is this popular support that must be destroyed in order for the organization to cease functioning.

Crushing al Qaeda while maintaining a Strong America

Mr. Pena's advice for dealing with al Qaeda is fairly simple: crush the leadership and remove the motivation. This is excellent advice and in fact has been practiced successfully before by countries when non-state actors rise up to challenge the state. The key here is to use both the iron fist and the velvet glove. The leadership is crushed as an example to all others... Read more ›

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent read, May 3, 2006

By	William L. T. Schirano (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Insightful and well-written, Winning the Un-war is an important contribution to understanding the evolution of the Bush administration's "global war on terrorism"--its successes and more importantly, its failures.

As the title of the book suggests, Pena's central argument revolves around the concept that the "war on terror" is both a rhetorical and operational misnomer. He posits that in order to prevail in this "Un-war," the United States will need to radically change its strategies to meet the security challenges of the post 9/11 era.

Of these challenges, none is more important to Pena than al Qaeda--that he identifies as the true threat to the United States. As such, the war in Iraq--often cited as the "central front" in the war on terror--is viewed by Pena as a dangerous distraction that has, and will continue to hurt America's ability to defend its truly vital national interests.

Though this hypothesis may strike some readers as having been raised some years back, Winning the Un-war is anything but another Wilsonian rehash.

Indeed Pena's analysis goes far beyond the familiar pleas of reforming multilaterals and courting allies. Transitioning seamlessly from closing shop in Iraq, he offers logical and concise policy alternatives to problems such as streamlining the military, fixing homeland security, and ultimately reforming U.S. foreign policy itself.

Whether readers agree with his approach or not, Pena's breed of defensive realism (which should not be confused with isolationism) offers fresh solutions to complex problems--something dreadfully lacking in today's polarized environment (Neo-Conservative vs. Wilsonian).

Overall, Winning the Un-war will should prove a worthwhile read to anyone who is interested in evaluating the range of options when it comes to protecting this country and ensuring that the next generation is better off than the current one.