In Autumn 2003, Donald Rumsfeld asked his top advisors a now-famous question: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring, and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

Not our friends: Osama bin Laden supporters in
Karachi, Pakistan demonstrate their contempt for
the United States. AP Photo/K. Bangash

It was precisely the right question to ask, lodged within a memo that Rumsfeld wrote to stir new thinking about the long-term prospects for what he labeled the Global War on Terror. If there is some awkwardness in the way the Secretary of Defense posed this question, it is because the first two actions (capturing and killing) result directly from the use of force; while the second two (deterring and dissuading) ultimately rely on appeals to the "hearts and minds" of human beings.

The data accumulated since Rumsfeld asked this question strongly suggest an answer. On September 11, 2001, Americans were utterly shocked by the phenomenon of suicide bombers aimed against us — 19 young men who willingly gave their lives to kill a much larger number of Americans for the cause of al-Qaeda. Five years later, suicide bombings no longer shock: they have become normalized in our expectations. During a typical week in the summer of 2006 in Iraq alone, there were at least a half-dozen suicide bombings, so many that we considered them as newsworthy only in passing. Eighteen months ago, Britons were stunned by the notion that "British citizens" could become suicide bombers on London subways and buses. That this summer’s foiled airplane plot also involved a large number of British subjects was, sadly, less dramatic. If the available pool of suicide bombers is a reasonable proxy by which we can measure the number of terrorists for whom deterrence and dissuasion have utterly failed, then clearly we are losing this war in a very big way.

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Another set of measures is provided by the Pew Surveys on global attitudes toward the United States. More than half the populations of Egypt and Jordan, and a third of the population of Turkey, believe that violence against civilian targets can be justified in the defense of Islam. More than half of Egyptians and Jordanians, and nearly two-thirds of Indonesians, are certain that Arabs did not carry out the 9/11 attacks. Around two-thirds of British Muslims believe that "Westerners" are selfish and arrogant; more than half say they are "violent." A majority of Muslims in Nigeria believe that many or most Muslims in their country support al-Qaeda; more than a third of Pakistanis say that this is true of their country.

Have we become numb to the implications of this sort of evidence?

These numbers alone do not definitively prove that we are losing Rumsfeld’s war. After all, a person can hold anti-American beliefs without necessarily engaging in violent, extremist behavior. But it would take an extraordinary leap of faith to bet our foreign and security policies on the proposition that one doesn’t feed the other, to our disadvantage and great danger.

The question the next administration will face is this: "Why are we losing and what can we do about it?"

Part of the answer is easy — our tactics are sloppy and awkward. The U.S. government promotes something called "public diplomacy" as our principal weapon in the war of ideas. But as currently conceptualized, public diplomacy is a peculiar mix of arrogance and condescension. It rests on one of two propositions, both of which look very weak on close examination.

The first is that people oppose or hate us because they "just don’t understand" what we are doing or what we stand for. The presumption, in other words, is that "we" know better than "they" what their interests really are, and that better communications can solve this problem. But it is more likely that "they" very well understand the policies we advance, and disagree for their own very good reasons.

The second proposition is that "they" perfectly understand how U.S. policies hurt their interests, their desires, and their pride — but that a compelling American "message" can change the emotional or intellectual valence with which they view that hurt. Call it what you will — messaging, advertising, or in the current preferred jargon, "framing": the implications are entirely the same. To believe that more skillful framing can really work, you need to hold some very peculiar, possibly racist, and certainly condescending beliefs about the intellectual and emotional capabilities of the "targets" of our tactics.

Consider what we Americans claim to believe about individual opinion. Here at home, our culture now celebrates the unassailable value of an individual’s personal beliefs, opinions, and assessments in the search for what is meaningful and true. We are nearly obsessed with things like citizen journalism, blogs, affiliative sorting on the Web ("people who liked this book also liked …"), and "the wisdom of crowds." Yet when we speak to the Arab world, we deny them the individualism inherent in our domestic life to assert that we can tell "them" with authority what is right and what they ought to believe. But, as "they" can see for themselves, dissent is at the heart of our own system — at least for people we respect. We can’t have it both ways.

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