THE WAR THEY WANT US TO FIGHT
A few days ago I was asked a question that, apparently, concerns three theaters of crisis that are very different from one another: Afghanistan, the Red Sea and Gaza. The question was, in substance, this: are we witnessing a structural change in the way asymmetric power is exercised, or has conventional military doctrine simply become too slow to adapt?
As such, it is a question that deserves a much broader answer than the one normally given when talking about terrorism, proxies and regional conflicts, because the problem, in my view, is not simply that non-state actors are today capable of putting States enormously more powerful than themselves in difficulty.
We already know this.
The problem is something else.
It is possible that some of these actors have understood that it is no longer necessary to militarily defeat a Western society in order to modify its political behavior. It is enough to be able to condition its reactions and, if possible, turn them into a source of further destabilization.
This is a form of warfare much more sophisticated than the one we are accustomed to recognizing.
Three threats that are not the same threat
Let us start from a point that I consider indispensable: the Taliban, the Houthis and Hamas are not the same thing. They have different origins, different objectives, different structures and different relationships with the States that support or use them.
The Taliban are the product of a particular Afghan history, which also developed in the environment created by the war against the Soviet occupation and the subsequent collapse of the Afghan State. Hamas, instead, originates from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and subsequently develops a strategic relationship with Iran. The Houthis belong to a specific Yemeni history, but over time they have become one of the most important instruments through which Tehran can project military capabilities toward the Red Sea.
For these reasons, just as it would make no sense to invent the convenient narrative of a single command structure where it has not been demonstrated that there is one, it would be equally naive to ignore the strategic convergences.
What we must observe is the progressive transformation of an old rule of asymmetric warfare: the weaker actor no longer necessarily seeks to defeat the stronger one, but seeks to make the stronger one’s superiority unusable. And this represents a difference of enormous importance.
From military warfare to the war of perception
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union supported, directly or indirectly, an impressive number of peripheral conflicts and armed movements in very many areas of the globe.
Afghanistan represents one of the most significant examples.
Washington at the time, as is well known, supported the mujahideen who were fighting the Red Army, while Pakistan and other regional actors played a decisive role. From that war emerged, and thanks to it subsequently took shape, a political, military and ideological environment destined to produce consequences that were nothing short of disastrous and that would characterize our history well beyond 1989. And this, on closer examination, also because of a strategic choice by the United States that can still be criticized for its consequences, especially if one thinks about what had happened, all things considered, only a few years earlier in Iran.
As is well known, at the time of the Iranian political crisis of the 1970s, the USSR, which looked with considerable interest at the crisis of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – a faithful ally of the United States and the West – and with sympathy at his principal opponent – that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini already exiled in 1963 –, came to regret its position considerably when, after the revolution, Khomeini not only adopted an anti-American line but also an anti-Soviet one, in accordance with the principle “neither East nor West,” primarily because the Islamic Republic was ideologically hostile to communism and Marxist atheism, but did so as the highest representative of a country that had indeed emerged from a fierce dictatorship, only to enter one of the most oppressive political realities of contemporary history: a theocratic State founded on a rigid religious interpretation of power.
An opposition whose intensity reached its peak with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, an invasion condemned by Khomeini’s Iran, which stigmatized it and which, in turn, harshly repressed the Tudeh Party, communist and historically close to the USSR, especially during the 1980s, while also supporting, in its own forms and for its own purposes, the Afghan resistance. And it is not clear how Washington would have thought it could manage, if not actually control, once the Soviet withdrawal had taken place, those forces that it had helped support during the war.
For this reason as well, I find it improper that even today there are those who believe that the Taliban were simply a product of the United States, forgetting that wars produce human, ideological and military infrastructures that can survive the war that generated them: and this is one of the lessons we should have learned.
The problem is that today the battlefield has expanded even further given that this is no longer only the territory, but rather the perception of the territory; it is no longer only the population, but the perception that the population has of itself; it is no longer only the ability to strike the enemy, but rather the ability to convince him to strike himself.
The real leap in asymmetry
Let us imagine an organization that knows perfectly well that it cannot win a conventional war against a Western power and this because: it cannot destroy its air force, it cannot compete with its navy, it cannot conquer Washington, London, Paris, Rome or Berlin, but it can do something else.
It can provoke, it can strike, it can spread propaganda, it can exploit an already existing social fracture, it can use religion as an identity instrument, it can transform an external conflict into an internal controversy, it can make every terrorist attack produce a political response and every political response produce a new opportunity for propaganda, it can prepare a heinous action for the precise purpose of forcing the adversary to strike, exasperated, with unprecedented determination in order to neutralize it once and for all.
At that point the question changes. It is no longer “How can I defeat my enemy?”, but becomes “How can I induce my enemy to behave in the way that suits me?” and this, in my view, is the real evolution of strategic asymmetry.
The front we have underestimated
And this is where we arrive at the most delicate issue because there is a second threat, distinct from the one represented by the territorial and military actors we have just examined: it is the jihadist threat internal to Western societies. A real threat that concerns, albeit in different ways, Europe, Canada, Australia and, naturally, the United States.
Here, in fact, the phenomenon takes on different characteristics because we no longer have only an organization that wants to conquer a territory, but a plurality of networks, groups, radicalized individuals and potentially autonomous subjects, although ideologically coordinated in some way, who can produce strategic effects even without being subject to a centralized operational direction.
And it is precisely here that I would propose a distinction: one mode can be coordinated while the other can be decentralized. The first is that of the cognitive attack. The second is that of provocation.
The cognitive attack: “divide and conquer”
The first level, as we have discussed several times previously, consists in working on perception: it is not necessary to convince everyone since it is enough to create a fracture.
A fracture between Muslims and non-Muslims, between citizens and immigrants, between right and left, between supporters of Israel and supporters of the Palestinians, between secularists and believers, between institutions and minorities, between citizens and security forces.
Contemporary terrorism has already demonstrated how important digital propaganda, transnational communication and the ability to transform local events into global narratives are, but here the issue becomes even more sophisticated given that the objective is not necessarily to recruit a terrorist, but rather to create the conditions in which the future terrorist becomes psychologically and socially possible.
And this is certainly a fundamental difference.
The second mode: provocation
Then there is the second level, which is the one that does not need to be centrally coordinated. The one that requires the presence on the territory of an individual, a cell, a radicalized group, an apparently isolated subject, a sleeper organization, all capable of carrying out an action that is nominally autonomous, but whose effect can be anything but autonomous.
Let us think of a religious provocation, a violent act against defenseless civilians, a protest that transforms a public space into a place of identity-based confrontation, or a demand that is perceived by the majority as an attack on its cultural identity.
I am not arguing that every manifestation of this kind is jihadist, since that would be absurd. I am arguing something different, because a radical movement may have an interest in creating a situation in which even an action not directly controlled by it produces a reaction useful to its narrative.
This is the point: there is no need for an operational command center that orders everything given that, in the end, what matters most is a convergence of effects. Effects for whose countering it is of little use to try to identify and neutralize the individual actors, it being more useful to act on the perceptual modalities of the recipients of the effects of such actions, preparing them and putting them in a position to understand the operational logic that aims to determine that articulated complex of separating reactions which, as its ultimate goal, has the intense polarization of the society of which they are an integral part and which, as such, favors that instability and ungovernability that are fundamental for increasing its vulnerability.
The polarization machine
The scheme, at that point, becomes almost elementary, and indeed the sequence provocation → reaction → generalization → fear → community identification → polarization → radicalization → new provocation takes the form of a circuit whose most dangerous element is that each actor can convince himself that he is simply reacting to the other. In it, the jihadist says “They are persecuting us”; the native population responds “They are invading us”; the moderate Muslim thinks “They are attacking me too”; the radical replies to him “We told you so,” and thus the circle closes.
In such a modus operandi the initial provocation can be small, but the reaction can become enormous, and it is the reaction that produces the real strategic result.
The transformation of the minority into a political bloc
Here lies, in my view, the most important point, consisting in the fact that jihadism needs to transform religious identity into political identity. It is not enough for millions of Muslims to exist in Europe or North America. It needs those Muslims to progressively perceive themselves as a distinct community, threatened and forced into internal solidarity.
And here we must formally introduce a hypothesis that, however politically uncomfortable, I consider absolutely legitimate and necessary to submit to analysis: it is possible that part of contemporary jihadist strategy aims not at the immediate conquest of Western societies, but at their progressive identity polarization, with the prospect of transforming a religious minority into an increasingly cohesive and autonomous political subject.
In this sense it is not necessary for this project to be shared by all Islamists. It is not necessary for all the actors involved to know the plan, and above all it is not necessary for there to be a single command center, given that it is enough for there to be actors who consider this result desirable.
And it is here, at this level, that the issue of Islamization deserves to be addressed without taboos.
I am not saying that, for example, Europe is destined to be Islamized. I am saying that the possibility of a political project of progressive Islamization of segments of Western societies is a strategic hypothesis that cannot be removed from the field of possibilities simply because it is politically uncomfortable. And I say this as an analyst and not as an Islamophobe, which would moreover be absurd because it is necessary to be perfectly clear that being Islamic is not the same as being Islamist, and being Islamist is not the same as being jihadist.
In my view, however, such considerations require a serious analyst not to eliminate a scenario because he does not like it. A serious analyst, confronted with a hypothesis of this kind, studies it, and in order to do so looks for the indicators that confirm it as well as those that disprove it, and in doing this seeks above all to understand who would have an interest in promoting it.
The Muslim Brotherhood and the long game
This brings us to the Muslim Brotherhood, but here too we must be precise: Muslim Brotherhood does not automatically mean jihadism, although it is necessary to be perfectly clear that it would be equally naive to ignore that the history of modern political Islam also passes through that experience.
Hamas originates precisely from the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, and Hamas’s subsequent transformation into a political-military and terrorist organization demonstrates that there are different paths through which political Islam can evolve.
In this context the question that, therefore, we must ask ourselves in the West is another one: to what extent can some forms of Islamist identity mobilization contribute, voluntarily or involuntarily, to the formation of those politically separate communities that jihadism would have an interest in radicalizing?
It is a question, not a sentence, but it is a question that must be asked and requires the search for an adequate answer.
Iran and Turkey: not necessarily masterminds, certainly actors
At this point Iran and Turkey enter the scene. Here too I prefer to avoid the theory of the great command center. We do not need to imagine that Tehran or Ankara control every event. Intelligent States do not necessarily control a crisis: they exploit it.
Iran has built over the years an extraordinary network of relations with non-state armed organizations: Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militias, Houthis.
Turkey, through different instruments and with different objectives, has developed its own capacity for regional and transnational influence.
They are not equivalent strategies. They must not be confused, but both demonstrate one thing: the projection of power in the 21st century does not necessarily pass through military occupation, but can pass through networks, diasporas, organizations, media, religions, financing, new technologies, narratives and above all through the ability to influence subjects who formally do not belong to the State that supports them.
Ceuta: the laboratory of pressure
And this is where the case of Ceuta also becomes interesting. The 2021 episode, with the entry of thousands of people into Spanish territory, took place within the framework of the serious diplomatic crisis between Madrid and Rabat: an entry that we do not need to transform into something that has not been demonstrated, but that it would be equally wrong not to study as an example of a concrete strategic possibility, given that migratory pressure can be transformed into an instrument of geopolitical pressure.
This does not mean that every migrant is an instrument, but that a human mass can be used as leverage, and when that leverage is combined with an identity crisis internal to European societies, the effect can become much greater than that produced by the simple migratory phenomenon: a circumstance, this one, that gives rise to the type of scenario that an analyst must necessarily keep under observation, as well as the one related to the practices of containing the flows themselves.
In this sense, consider the positions taken over time toward the European States by Libyan Gen. Haftar and by Ankara.
And then there is us
Here we arrive at the most difficult point because the problem is not only what others do, but what we do: if a provocation is followed by a political reaction that identifies an entire community with an extremist minority, the result can be devastating. And this not because the response is necessarily illegitimate, but because it can be strategically counterproductive.
This also applies to democracies that respond to terrorism with perfectly understandable measures. From this follows that the question we absolutely must ask ourselves is: does this measure increase security without increasing polarization (a polarization that can be stimulated even merely by inappropriate statements, especially if they are generalized)?
If the answer is yes, fine. If instead a given measure ends up increasing polarization and, at the same time, offers jihadist propaganda the image of a Western society hostile to Islam, then we must have the courage to recognize that we are trying to counter a threat with an instrument that risks, paradoxically, feeding it.
This applies all the more if such a policy is not accompanied by a rigorous system of control and verification of migratory flows, a policy genuinely capable of distinguishing those who are actually willing to integrate from those who show adherence, even only at the ideological level, to the positions of extremist groups in the broad sense and jihadist groups in the strict sense. A serious policy should therefore combine firmness in combating irregular immigration, accurate and verifiable checks on those seeking entry and protection, and a clear demand for respect for the rules and fundamental principles of the host society.
It is also necessary to avoid admitting people who, because of objective and verifiable conditions, do not have a concrete possibility of being usefully integrated into the labor market. Economic and social integration in fact constitutes an essential prerequisite for preventing the formation of pockets of marginalization and exclusion, which can become favorable ground for recruitment by subjects and organizations that fuel feelings of hostility and outright hatred toward the West.
And this is where we arrive at European politics.
The responses of governments, including that of Italy, must also be evaluated from this perspective. And in this sense it is of very little interest to know whether a given political response is “right-wing” or “left-wing,” since the assessment of its effectiveness should be given priority because the adversary does not need us to adopt its ideology: it is enough for us to adopt the response it needs.
The paradox of deterrence
At this point we can return to the initial question: “Has conventional deterrence failed?” In my humble opinion, no, but it has become insufficient because you can deter an army, you can deter a fleet, you can destroy a missile depot, you can strike a command center, but it is much more difficult to deter a social process and almost impossible to deter a radicalized individual who decides to turn himself into a weapon.
Not to mention, above all, how difficult it is to deter an adversary who does not necessarily want to conquer your territory, but wants to modify the way in which you govern it.
This is the new asymmetry.
Victory without conquest
From everything set out above emerges, among other things, the need to completely change the concept of victory. This is because a jihadist organization does not necessarily have to conquer Rome, Paris, London or Washington, just as it does not have to plant a flag on Parliament, nor occupy a province, being able to consider something much more modest a success:
- a more frightened society;
- a more polarized politics;
- a more isolated minority;
- a more hostile majority;
- a leadership forced to choose continually between security and freedom;
- a public debate incapable of distinguishing Islam from jihadism;
- a generation of young people raised in the belief that their religious identity is incompatible with their national identity.
If these processes become consolidated, the organization has not conquered the country. It has conquered something much more important: the way in which the country perceives itself.
The real new deterrence
And so the answer to Saurav’s question is, for me, this: I do not believe that we are witnessing the end of conventional deterrence. I believe that we are witnessing the end of its self-sufficiency.
The deterrence of the 21st century will have to be simultaneously military, political, informational and social, and as such it will have to know how to strike – at least in all those cases in which this is still possible – the terrorist organization without striking the community in which it seeks to hide. It will have to know how to distinguish the Muslim from the jihadist. The Islamist from the Muslim. Hamas from the Palestinian. The Iranian government from the Iranian population. A legitimate protest from an influence operation. A migratory phenomenon from a possible form of geopolitical pressure, but above all it will have to prevent the response to the provocation from becoming part of the provocation itself.
Because this is the point that we continue to underestimate: the real objective of the asymmetric actor may not be to destroy us, but rather to force us to progressively destroy the mutual trust upon which our society is founded.
And if this hypothesis is even only partially correct, then our first line of defense is not an aircraft carrier, but the ability to distinguish. The second is the ability to remain calm. The third is the ability not to turn millions of citizens into a single imaginary enemy because the day on which we stop distinguishing the jihadist from the Muslim, the Islamist from the citizen, the provocateur from the community and the adversary from the innocent bystander, we will have begun to fight the war according to the rules established by the adversary.
And that is precisely what a good strategist should prevent us from doing.
The question, then, is no longer whether non-state actors have learned to challenge States.
They already have.
The truly important question
have we understood that, in the next phase of asymmetric warfare, the target may no longer be our territory, but our ability to remain a society?
