Identifying Foes and Friends in a War against Terrorism

By Albert F. Eldridge, Jr.
Department of Political Science

During the spring semester of 1997, I taught a freshmen seminar at Duke University titled "The American Home Front during World War II". One of the students, a Korean-American woman, kept a journal of her reactions to articles about Americans at home during America's last great war. Recoiling from the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, America was mobilizing for war and one of its leading pictorial magazines was preparing its citizens for battle. An important part of that preparation was portraying the face of the enemy - determining friend from foe.

In an article published in the December 22, 1941 issue of Life magazine titled "A Handbook for Americans," something caught Jennifer's attention and disturbed the both of us. A section of the handbook detailed ways that Americans could "tell a Jap from a Chinese." Quoting from her journal, "I found these stereotypes to be quite ridiculous - especially using characterizations such as 'never has rosy cheeks' [in referencing the Japanese], but I was also disturbed because it emphasized the fact that many Japanese-Americans were being persecuted." Jennifer's journal entry reminds me that there are some problems of mobilizing a society for war, whether it is against Japan in 1941 or against international terrorism in 2001.

One problem that would seem the easiest to solve is: "How do you identify friend from foe?"

Another problem is: "How not to lose friends and alienate bystanders who might get caught in the middle in the process of waging war on one's foes?" The nature of terrorism makes both tasks difficult.

In a recent book on 21st century terrorism, Cindy Combs notes that terrorism is a synthesis of war and theatre: a dramatization of violence which is perpetrated on innocent victims and played before an audience in the hope of creating a mood of fear without apology or remorse for political purposes. Terrorism is therefore by its nature a clandestine activity carried out by actors operating in the shadows of societies. Who are the individuals and groups who practice this tactic? What would a profile look like of today's "typical" terrorist? We know that they are young - having in some cases been recruited in secondary schools. They are both men and women who have less formal education and family wealth than their counterparts in the 1960s. More importantly, in confronting them we know that they engage in dehumanizing their victims - victims do not have an individual face, nor are they parents or husbands or wives - they are simply the "enemy." Coupled with this tendency to engage in what one noted social psychologist calls "black and white thinking," today's terrorist commits to the abandonment of all restraints on the use of violence. If we were simply going to capture these individuals or groups and bring them to justice, his is who we would be looking for. Not an easy foe to apprehend.

President Bush made it clear, however, that this is not just a war against the individuals responsible for the atrocities of September 11th, or terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden, but that it is instead a war against state sponsored terrorism as well. What does it mean to be at war with international terrorism? And what problems does that present to the United States?

Combs cautions us to remember that the notion of sponsorship implies some degree of either control or direct involvement in the terrorist acts of others - this sponsorship makes it possible for terrorist groups to act. In a sense, a country that harbors or supplies terrorist groups with money, materials, training or even psychological support engages in surrogate terrorism. These so-called "surrogates" are using others (the terrorists) to advance their cause or national interests. In this sense these sponsoring countries become a foe and a possible target. At the top of today's list of such states is Afghanistan, but also included are such historical suspect states as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, North Korea and Cuba. Sponsorship often proves quite difficult to establish in a legal sense. Proof of control or degree of involvement gain importance in time of war, especially among our allies. Such evidence becomes essential when acts of war are initiated.

Whether the United States will use diplomacy or force against such surrogates of terrorism is not clear. Nor is it even clear at this point what benchmarks we will use to measure success or victory against these surrogates. Because of the nature of terrorism, military action alone is not likely to be enough to win a war against terrorism itself. And, unless we are willing to alienate moderates among friends, foes and bystanders, we cannot use military force against a country unless we are certain of their actual sponsorship. The more foes that we draw into this war, the more complex will be the conduct of the war. The more complex the war, the more dangerous might be the consequences for not only foes, but for friends and bystanders as well.

In the new geopolitics of this war against international terrorism, we define as "friends" any state that is a professed enemy of our enemy. This includes old friends and allies like Britain and France - in fact all of our NATO allies. It also includes new friends like Pakistan and Central Asian Republics such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that border on our current primary foe - Afghanistan. The list now includes governments like Jordan and Egypt who might be willing to isolate or even eliminate groups within their territories sympathetic to our foes. Many new friends and new allies come with inherent risks. These range from the obvious risks of making short-term deals with countries like Pakistan while losing long-term advantages with a country like India. There are less obvious but no less serious risks of setting into motion domestic forces within bystander Islamic countries like Jordan or committed countries like Egypt that could ultimately change the regime in power to say nothing of destabilizing the entire Arab-Israeli dynamic. While it is psychologically comforting to have so many friends during this time of national trauma, it is well to remind us that there are also risks involved. Not only risks to our foes who support international terrorism, but also risks to our old and new "friends" as this broader geopolitical campaign unfolds.

In the good old days, it seemed like such an easy task to identify and give a face to who were your friends and foes at time of war, even at the risk of racial and cultural stereotyping. We are finding that it is an even more difficult task today to be at war with a concept like "international terrorism" because we also must give it a face - just as we did in the early days of WWII. Americans have a tendency to desensitize ourselves to the power of concepts like "crisis" and "war" by using them indiscriminately over the last 60 years to characterize one campaign after another. We have declared "wars" on almost everything from poverty to AIDS to drug usage, and we have confronted "crisis" in everything from morality to health care. Now we are really at war and are confronting a genuine national crisis because to war with international terrorism is to war with other countries. Now it really will matter who are our friends and foes, and it will be no less difficult today to identify them than it was 60 years ago.