From the President: The Role of Religion in Winning the Long War

By Dr. Chris Seiple on 06 March 2007

A popular question these days is this: Are we safer today than we were on September 10, 2001? But this isn’t the best way to frame the issue, because the forces that attacked on September 11, 2001, had long been brewing, and were going to attack us one way or another. And they still will.

We are in a long war—a global counterinsurgency that is suffused with religion—and we need to be asking not just how we survive but how we win. Victory includes three elements. It is the absence of attacks on U.S. citizens, interests, and allies. It is the comprehensive defeat of present, and denial of future, enemies. It is the sustainment of freedom worldwide in a manner consistent with the rule of law and local culture.

The means to these ends will take different forms under different leaders in the coming century. The thing we know for sure is that our thinking must not be merely defensive but transformative. Winning in this broader, more holistic sense requires a long-view guided by the following five principles.

Globalization Cuts Both Ways

Globalization is the worldwide influence of ideas through technology, trade, and travel, creating a more accessible, or flat, world for everyone. Globalization simultaneously encourages integration and separation, with positive and negative implications for each. No matter one’s perspective, the end result is change.

Change challenges the familiar way of things; it lays siege to our understanding of life, our identity. Globalization creates a feeling of psychological rootlessness and spiritual dislocation among all of us. In such times, people yearn for meaning in the vacuum that globalization creates. And meaning will be provided—for good or ill—by those who can tell a story of unchanging moral imperative in a constantly changing world.

God Counts

Religions have a story to tell. They provide a meta-narrative that is comforting, in part, because it is explanatory, offering an understanding of the present suffering and injustice in the world. This world-encompassing meta-narrative is especially evident in Christianity and Islam, which have been global in their perspective and their scope since their foundations.

For example, I live among mostly conservative evangelicals in rural Virginia. I have also had opportunity to spend time in the rural parts of Central Asia, and in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. Along the way I have developed some very powerful friendships among Christians and Muslims. And while I have experienced almost identical negative stereotypes about each other—almost always from fear and not fact—I have also found that conservative Christians and Muslims have much in common. Their identity in a transcendent and sovereign God who cares about justice and mercy provides an absolute anchor for their view of the world. Conservative Muslims and Christians do not want their children exposed to the worst of western “culture” through their satellite dish. They want to raise their children to love and honor God.

That God can be at the center of one’s view of the world is a difficult reality to grasp for society’s elites in the West. Largely possessed of a post-modern cosmology—and educated as such—these elites have long been more comfortable promoting secular rationalism. There has always been, however, a twofold problem with this approach.

Post-modern secularism has no story. It is many stories, none of which provide an all-encompassing moral imperative, let alone an explanatory framework. As a result, secularism cannot understand that believers are willing to die for their faith even as (sometimes unknowing) heretics will kill innocents for their religion.

Five years since 9/11, secular elites—many of whom occupy the top tiers of our best international relations schools, philanthropic foundations, and the foreign policy elements of our government—are now beginning to recognize religion as, at least, a legitimate component of realpolitik. Some even realize that while religion might be a negative catalyst to conflict, faith can serve as a positive component of sustainable solutions.

Guns are not Enough

Even if one can admit that “God Counts,” finding a place for religion in U.S. foreign policy requires that we recover from our Cold War hangover. In this “worldview,” national security is something that the military does overseas. We must de-militarize our national security, making it a more balanced and seamless blend of law enforcement, diplomacy, socio-economic action, and, when necessary, military intervention.

We must finally recognize that this war is a global counterinsurgency against heretic terrorists who use Islam to justify the killing of innocent people.¹ If this is the case, then understanding religion is necessarily central to a comprehensive effort to educate and synergistically apply all the elements of national power. In other words, we first need officials from across the agencies of the U.S. government who have been educated and trained together—and their agencies funded—to understand how they act as a whole against the threat of these heretic terrorists. In this context, there needs to be a place for religion to be a part of the solution since it is so clearly a part of the problem.

To be sure, there are pockets of good people beginning to work this way. For example, the Army and the Marine Corps have developed a new counterinsurgency manual that calls for a “flexible, adaptive force” led by “agile, well-informed, culturally astute leaders.”² The very need for such a document—five years after 9/11 and three years after an insurgency had begun in Iraq—indicates how unprepared we are.³ Indeed, Secretary of State Rice recently told Congress that 40% (129 people) of the 300 State Department slots for Iraq will have to be filled by military personnel. Because the civilian elements of U.S. national power have not been prepared, American military personnel will take on such responsibilities as “business development” and “city management.”⁴ Bottom line: we have a military just catching up to the nature of the war it is fighting and a civil service corps that is completely unprepared.

Sadly, as one reviews the most recent literature on this topic, religion, unbelievably, is not significantly addressed in any fashion; except to provide a secular category to name the enemy we are fighting…which, in turn, encourages analysts to think of Islam as a monolith.⁵ How can we fight this kind of war without leaders across our government, to include the military, who are “agile, well-informed, culturally astute leaders,” leaders who at least understand that religion cannot be the “missing dimension in mission planning” anymore?⁶

The fundamental responsibility of Americans committed to effective foreign policy in the coming years must be the design of an education system that creates a common understanding and culture—in part, through its inclusion of religion as a legitimate component of realpolitik—across the key agencies of the U.S. government such that U.S. policy can be properly implemented.

Such an educational system will take years to implement and hone. But Americans cannot shy away from this task. Without properly educated officials from across U.S. government agencies who are intentionally positioned to address such issues within the structure and process of making policy, U.S. policy will, by default, continue to be left in the operational hands of the Pentagon.⁷

The right people in the right positions, however, do not guarantee the right policy.

Grand Strategy Matters

If winning this war will take more than guns, and it necessarily includes religion, that “missing dimension of statecraft,”⁸ then we also need a consistent manner through which prioritized ends are matched with appropriate means. It is not an easy process in wartime, but it is paramount. For without a guiding policy, or grand strategy, that makes the sum greater than its parts, the proverbial hand will cut of the nose to spite the face.

Grand strategy is a living process that is constantly aware of the ends it seeks, as well as the means to get there. In fact:

“It is essential to conduct war with constant regard to the peace you desire … fighting power is but one of the instruments of grand strategy—which should take account of and apply the power of financial pressure, of diplomatic pressure, of commercial pressure, and, not least of ethical pressure to weaken the opponent’s will.”⁹

In other words, we must fight in such a manner that our means do not betray our message.

We must find a way to address religion in a practical and strategic manner across the spectrum of our grand strategy means—from our public diplomacy, to our foreign aid, to our military’s engagement of local imams, to the relationship between religious freedom and counterterrorism. Otherwise our ends will never be met.

Governance is the Goal

U.S. grand strategy, such that it is, ostensibly exists to protect U.S. national interests while promoting such cherished American values as “democracy,” “human rights,” and “religious freedom.” Unfortunately, as U.S. policy constantly utters these words, foreigners see both a disguise for U.S. imperialism as well as the hypocrisy of a country that is not accountable.

While American policy objectives should never stop aspiring to help develop mature democracies worldwide, the more practical and concrete step—at least for our present moment—is to nurture good governance through the rule of law in a manner that is consistent with the local culture.

Every culture has a mechanism—often religious—that demonstrates respect for others. The mechanism(s) that enable respect are the ones that U.S. policy, where possible, should come alongside as it helps develop the rule of law.

Showing respect—the pre-condition for enabling good governance—is difficult for Americans to accomplish in the Muslim world. For example, the overwhelming majority of U.S. policy-makers cannot distinguish between Sunni and Shi’a.¹⁰ In fact, it is almost impossible for Americans to respect Islam when a recent Gallup poll of Americans revealed that five years after 9/11, 57% of Americans essentially know “not much” or “nothing” about the “beliefs and view of Muslims” (the same percentage as just after 9/11). This same poll asked what Americans admired most about Muslim societies. 57% of Americans said “nothing” or “I don’t know.”

This poll concluded that Americans “see conflict with the Muslim world” as a function of “public relations” while Muslims “see conflict with the U.S.” as a function of “policy and respect.”¹¹

Conclusion

Mao Tse-tung, that implacable practitioner of insurgency, once wrote that “the living soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”¹²

If we are to win this long war, this global counterinsurgency, we must engage the world as it is, with a realism that respects the political and spiritual power of religion—and understands that only good theology defeats bad theology. We need a grand strategy that seeks to address religion through the promotion of rule of law in a manner consistent with the pre-existing cultural mechanisms of respect.

This is victory. For where there is a state and culture that promotes respect among its citizens through good governance, there will also be a robust pluralism that not only protects and celebrates the minority, it will prevent extremism from taking root.

This kind of preemptive peace is a grand strategy indeed. But if taken up earnestly and honestly, it will do much to strengthen our global civilization through the various, and often religious-based, identities who long for respect, not rhetoric.

Last updated 30 January 2009