A consortium of researchers dedicated to improving the understanding of the human causes and consequences of terrorism

Discussion Point: No, Virginia, It Is Not an Asymmetric War


The following is part of a series of thought pieces authored by members and friends of the START Consortium. These editorial columns reflect the opinions of the author(s), and not necessarily the opinions of the START Consortium. This series is penned by scholars who have grappled with complicated and often politicized topics, and our hope is that they will foster thoughtful reflection and discussion by professionals and students alike.


If there’s one lesson that generals, national security affairs analysts, and armchair strategists think they have learned it is this:  Never fight today’s war on the basis of lessons learned from mistakes in the last war.  Don’t build a Maginot line that would have thwarted the Schlieffen plan, but can’t stop Hitler’s blitzkrieg.  Don’t apply the lesson of Munich—that world-devouring dictators cannot be appeased—by treating North Vietnam as Nazi Germany.  In the War on Terror, don’t forget the lesson of Vietnam:  asymmetric wars require careful counter-insurgency strategies and domestic support for devoting immense resources over a very extended period of time.

What will be the lesson of the War on Terror?  There will be many.  Tragically, one of them will be that military and political leaders can believe they have learned not to fight today’s war based on yesterday’s lessons, when they have not.   For in terms of grand strategy, the U.S. response to al-Qaeda after 9/11 committed exactly that error.   Realizing that their predecessors suffered defeat in Vietnam because they did not understand the requirements of asymmetric warfare, the national security managers that produced and have guided the War on Terror in its various guises were all about fighting an asymmetric war correctly.

Indeed the American military did develop careful counter-insurgency strategies (after an initial World War II style invasion of Iraq) and the country’s political leadership successfully spun the struggle against al-Qaeda as justifying commitment of virtually limitless resources.    Yet our immense efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq are unlikely to produce outcomes more desirable than those in Vietnam following our departure from that country.  For the “COIN” type improvements we did make on a tactical level could only have mattered decisively if we were actually engaged in a Vietnam-style asymmetric war.  But that is not and has not been the case.  The error was not in the tactics, per se.  After all, the Maginot line was built correctly--for 1914 problems.  In the War on Terror, the really consequential “fighting-the-last-war” mistake was the very framing of it as an “asymmetric war.”  That was an accurate label for the struggle between the U.S. and the North Vietnamese Communists.  But al-Qaeda posed a challenge to the United States as fundamentally different in kind from Vietnam as was the challenge posed by the North Vietnamese to that faced by the U.S. in World War II. 

We have fought al-Qaeda terrorists imagining them and portraying them as foes in an attritional conflict stretching, at least, across the entire Muslim world.  As the Vietnamese wanted to drive us from Indochina and abandon our South Vietnamese clients, so, it is said, al-Qaeda wants to drive us from the Muslim world and the Middle East in particular.  It seeks to weaken us; and destroy those who rely upon us.   On this account, the outcome of the struggle will be a function of the determination and resilience of our society as a whole--its ability to inflict and accept punishment, or at least risk, over a long period of time. 

The fundamental error here arises from the fact that al-Qaeda in 2001 was not, as was North Vietnam, a mature and disciplined state committed to devoting all its society’s resources to a specific goal defined in nationally existential terms.   As our best research on al-Qaeda has demonstrated, its attack on the “far enemy” (us) was a desperate act—a kind of “Hail Mary” pass intended to prevent the organization from falling into the dustbin of history.   Corresponding to the imperatives facing a weak but transformational organization teetering on the edge of both irrelevance and obscurity, the attacks of 9/11 were not designed to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world.  The organization was in a much too early stage of development to pursue that long range objective.  The imperative guiding its actions was survival--to establish its importance, or at least its relevance, in “local” political communities.   At their most ambitious those who destroyed the towers in Manhattan, flew a plane into the Pentagon, and hijacked the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania, were hoping to transform the political landscape of the Muslim world.  To make that world more amenable to what were seen by the vast majority of its inhabitants as irrelevant rants by fanatics about Jews and Crusaders, what was needed was not American departure from the Middle East, but American led invasions of Muslim lands; not a lower profile for American, European, and Israeli policies in the Middle East, but spectacularly higher profiles; not retrenchment of U.S. policies, but a vast and aggressive expansion of American power; not protecting Muslims from American military might, but subjecting them to it as brutally and as bloodily as possible.

In other words, what al-Qaeda sought, and is still seeking, is for the United States to fight an asymmetric war with it—a war defined publicly, especially by the United States, in terms of generations, determined by the comparative willingness to sacrifice, and over stakes imagined as judgments about the worth of rival civilizations.    That is what they wanted from us; and that is what they got.    That is why the outcome of the struggle, at this point, has to be registered as a victory for al-Qaeda.  By abandoning the moniker of the War on Terror, and much of the previous administration’s inflated rhetoric, President Obama has moved in the right direction, but too slowly.  We should implement a much more systematic transformation in our stance toward al-Qaeda and its affiliates—based on application of a criminal activity frame for preventing acts of terror and prosecuting perpetrators; quiet, intensive, but focused surveillance; the limited use of covert and overt military power where absolutely needed; and a national reeducation program to normalize the nuisance of terrorist activity.  Only thus can we prevent al-Qaeda from spawning movements with which we will, in the future, be forced to fight asymmetric wars—wars our adversaries cannot now wage against us unless we mistakenly let them.


Dr. Ian Lustick is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies comparative politics, international politics, Middle Eastern politics, and agent-based, computer assisted modeling for the social sciences. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics, political identities and institutions, techniques of hegemonic analysis, the expansion and contraction of states, and on relationships among complexity, evolution, and politics. Dr. Lustick is a recipient of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the United States Institute of Peace.