"Losing the Battle for Hearts and Minds," by Ahmed Rashid - the Telegraph (UK), 11 September 2006. Rashid is a Pakistani journalist who has covered Central Asia for over 20 years, for publications including the Far East Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal. His books include Taliban and Jihad.
Five years after the September 11 attacks, unprecedented global co-operation in the police and intelligence fields has thwarted dozens of potential terrorist atrocities on the soil of Western nations.
Yet the traditional heartlands for sustaining Islamic extremists and their armies — Pakistan-Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East — are still being bitterly contested and even expanding as a result of the West's policy failures and refusal to allocate sufficient troops and resources to these regions....
[A]fter the war in Iraq and the US-British supported war in Lebanon, there is far greater anti-Americanism in the Muslim world than ever before and that could limit future intelligence co-operation.
Also, the West's capacity to negotiate regional disputes is being undermined. Senior US diplomats admit it will take one or two generations to turn around America's image and potential in the Muslim world....
Five years after liberating Afghanistan the West's failure to provide sufficient troops, money and resources to secure the country and carry out reconstruction is now forcing Nato troops to fight a resurgent Taliban in hand-to- hand combat.
President Hamid Karzai's political support is dwindling because Western largesse has not been forthcoming and he now has little to show his people....
In Somalia an extremist Islamic movement conquered the country while the Americans were busy backing discredited and now defeated warlords.
Al-Qa'eda is now free to build a major base in Somalia from where it can undermine other parts of Muslim Africa. In the Middle East there has emerged a new phenomenon of Islamic movements rather than secular resistance groups or states, winning support.
Despite Israel's insistence, Hamas and Hizbollah are not terrorist groups, but social and political movements with a strong Islamic agenda. Yet elements from these parties could become the cutting edge for a revamped al-Qa'eda in the Middle East. The growth of extremist Islam is directly related to the refusal by the West aggressively to address the Israel-Palestine issue.
Unless the West backs democratically-elected governments and then provides the resources to secure them, the battle for hearts and minds will never be won.
"Evaluating Our Partners and Allies Five Years Later," by Julianne Smith and Thomas Sanderson - special to the WashingtonPost.com's 'Think Tank Town' column, 11 September 2006. Both authors are with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Smith is a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the International Security Program. Sanderson is a Fellow and Director of the Transnational Threats Program.
Over the past week Americans have been inundated with special reports evaluating the United States' performance in the "Global War on Terrorism" since 9/11. But any examination of how far we have come and what remains to be done must also include a look at our partners and allies. That story -- how the world has contributed to America's fight against terror -- is an intricate mosaic of missteps, obstacles, accomplishments, heated debates and unpredictable results. While international counter-terrorism cooperation has soared over the last five years, today the global coalition is battered and bruised and in need of repair.
When the United States put out a call for partners following the September 11 attacks, virtually every country responded positively. Nations from every corner of the world offered an array of military, intelligence, economic and political support. Even traditional adversaries such as Libya and Syria contributed. And many of them delivered in the face of significant bureaucratic and cultural barriers at home.
The most remarkable barrier overcome by our allies has been public opinion. Once the Bush administration decided to take the fight to Iraq, public attitudes turned dramatically against the United States, making it difficult for foreign leaders to openly support the American-led war on terror. But despite deep divisions over Iraq, a number of countries -- including France and Germany, two of the most outspoken opponents of the Iraq war -- maintained strong counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States, albeit often discretely....
[N]ot all difficulties in counter-terrorism cooperation can be traced to our partners. In many cases, it has been the United States that has failed to foster long-term and cooperative partnerships. Most damaging has been the decline of U.S. moral authority, stemming first and foremost from the invasion and botched occupation of Iraq, but also from Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the renditions of terror suspects. The war in Iraq has also eclipsed other aspects of the fight against terror, frustrating partners intent on turning U.S. attention to preventing the proliferation of WMD, halting the spread of radicalization and strengthening intelligence sharing.
U.S. partnerships with countries with poor human rights records has left the impression that America will partner with anyone in the name of short-term tactical gains. Its decision, for example, to negotiate the use of Uzbekistan's Karshi-Khanabad airbase to assist with the mission in Afghanistan was sharply criticized given that country's dismal human rights record. Furthermore, some allies have started to question the overarching value of standing arm and arm with the United States when its global image is so tattered. As a result, international cooperation is becoming more difficult, not less....
"Bush's Approval Ratings Slumping Even Further in Europe," by Chris Cillizza and Zachary A. Goldfarb - the Washington Post, 10 September 2006.
President Bush's approval ratings in the United States are nothing to cheer about, but he can count himself lucky that the midterm elections will not be held in Europe. A comprehensive survey of public opinion in a dozen European nations and the United States found that things have gone from bad to worse when it comes to disdain for the administration and its national security policies.
The annual survey, taken by the highly regarded German Marshall Fund of the United States, shows that 77 percent of Europeans disapprove of the way Bush has handled international affairs, as compared with 56 percent who felt that way in GMF's "Transatlantic Trends" survey in 2002.
Asked how desirable it was for the United States to exert strong leadership on the world stage, 37 percent of Europeans said that should be a goal -- down from 64 percent five years ago. In this country, 82 percent of Americans think it is very desirable or somewhat desirable for the United States to exert leadership....
[But] even though Europeans' views of Bush have collapsed over the past five years, their fears about the threat posed by international terrorism have grown closer to Bush's view. Sixty-six percent of Europeans called terrorism an "extremely important" threat, up eight percentage points since last year. In Britain, which has been the target of several terrorist operations in the past year, the number of those viewing terrorism as a main priority rose by 22 percentage points. But Europeans remained wary of military action as the answer to security threats, and they put greater emphasis on diplomacy.
GMF President Craig Kennedy said the survey revealed "broad agreement on threats across the Atlantic and a profound division on how to deal with them."...
A detailed summary of the German Marshall Fund report is available online, as a .pdf file:
"Transatlantic Trends - Key Findings, 2006" - the German Marshal Fund (Washington, DC), September 2006. The excerpts below are from Section One, "Trends in Transatlantic Relations," pp. 5-6.
Although U.S. and European policymakers report that official relations have improved in the past year, most observers argue that the image of the United States and President Bush among the European publics has not improved since their strong opposition to the war in Iraq in 2006....
The proportions of Europeans who view U.S. leadership in world affairs as desirable has reversed since 2002, from 64% positive to 37% this year, and from 31% negative to 57%....Similarly, when asked to evaluate their feelings of warmth toward the United States on a 100-point thermometer scale, Europeans ratings declined from 64 degrees in 2002 to 51 in 2006....
Europeans continue to distinguish between their views of President Bush and their views of the United States more generally. While European attitudes toward President Bush’s handling of international affairs have fallen from 38% positive in 2002 to 18% in 2006, there is a 9-point gap between this figure and their evaluation of U.S. leadership in world affairs. This gap has generally persisted over five years....
Added 16 September:
"Winners and Losers Five Years After 9/11," by Jurek Martin (opinion) - the Financial Times (UK), 15 September 2006
....Mendacity and exaggeration have profited enormously from 9/11. Just this week the ABC “docu-drama” The Path to 9/11, seemed to imply that if Bill Clinton had not been dallying with an intern Osama Bin Laden would be six feet under. It was unadulterated CSI vs al-Qaeda rubbish, much more fiction than fact.
But we keep reading that more and more Americans believe, courtesy of internet babble, that the US government somehow took down the twin towers on 9/11 and that the plane hijacks never happened. Surely not even Michael Moore would concede the Bushies are good enough to pull that one off.
It is almost as if FDR’s great dictum “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” has been taken to exactly the opposite extremes he intended. Fear has unleashed the xenophobia that powers anti-immigrant sentiments in America; fatuously, it gave us “freedom fries” in the US Congress.
It also made beneficiaries of non-American universities, only too happy to accommodate the foreign students who used to come here in droves but found short-sighted national security considerations putting obstacles in their way. This will hurt America over the longer term.
Others have come out ahead of the game, too. As John Tierney wound up his New York Times column a week ago, “the terrorist threat is still small; it’s the terrorism industry that got big.” It is one of those comments, saying it all, which I would give my eye teeth to have written.
It is an industry that is all around us, when we board planes or watch “experts” pontificating on TV when they are not writing books without number that raise the fear factor further. Government deficits soar as the industry grabs even more of the federal and state dollar....
Foreign Policy has posted selections from 9/11 editorials from newspapers around the world to its website:
"9/11 Editorials from Around the World" - Foreign Policy, 12 September 2006
The editorial pages of global news outfits weighed in yesterday on the anniversary of 9/11, and they didn't have very positive things to say about U.S. foreign policy.
China's English People's Daily Online says U.S. foreign policy, "highjacked" by neo-conservatives, has increased the threat of terrorism worldwide by transforming Iraq into a "hotbed of training ground of terrorist activities." (sic)....
In The Moscow Times, Alexei Bayer also criticizes the global war on terror (GWOT), writing: "George W. Bush's administration swallowed al-Qaida's bait hook, line and sinker." Instead, he argues, the United States would have been better off ignoring terrorist "provocation" and not treating the conflict as a war, considering the age of terrorism - in the vein of the British in Northern Ireland - a time of "troubles."
Hassan Nafaa in Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly discusses how GWOT "became a war on Arabs and Muslims," saying that the United States conflated a war that should have been focused solely on al Qaeda....