RAND Report: US Strategy In Muslim World Counterproductive

The RAND Corporation, a highly respected non-profit policy research institute in the United States, says in its latest report on the ongoing War on Terror: "Large-scale U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world is at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible."

“Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national security threat the United States faces,” said David C. Gompert, the report's lead author and a senior fellow at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “Because this threat is likely to persist and could grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not capable of adequately addressing the challenge.”

The study finds that when infected by religious extremism, local insurgencies become more violent, resistant to settlement, difficult to defeat and likely to spread. The jihadist appeal to local insurgents is the message that their faith and homelands are under attack by the West and they should join the larger cause of defending Islam. This makes U.S. military intervention not only costly, but risky.

While the recent military surge has improved security in much of Iraq, “it would be a profound mistake to conclude from it that all the United States needs is more military force to defeat Islamist insurgencies,” Gompert said. “One need only contemplate the precarious condition of Pakistan to realize the limitations of U.S. military power and the peril of relying upon it.”

The report recommends that the United States should shift its priorities and funding to improve civil governance, build local security forces, and exploit information — capabilities that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan."

It is good to see that the US policy think tanks and researchers are finally beginning to recognize the follies of US policies. Let us hope that the current and incoming US administrations pay heed to what these researchers are finding and make dramatic policy changes before it is too late. I am hopeful that the world leaders can still pull us back from the brink and avoid catastrophic consequences of the Bush-Cheney policies of the last seven years.