The serious strategic predicament created by the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq by the United States and its key allies shows no sign of being alleviated. In Afghanistan, the dispute over the appointment of a new United Nations envoy in Kabul (where Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, vetoed the appointment of former British politician Paddy Ashdown to the role) is the surface of a deeper disarray. In Iraq, a number of signals (including the caution over US troop withdrawals expressed by defence secretary Robert M Gates during a two-day trip to Iraq, the ominous Sunni demonstrations in Diyala province, and new waves of Iraqi detainees inundating the US-controlled prison system) underline the difficulty of Washington and London's position.
The fundamental problem is that the strategy which these governments are pursuing is unsustainable. They might define their self-described peacekeeping and stabilization efforts as benign and constructive, but they are regarded in much of the world (especially the middle east and southwest Asia), as indeed an occupation designed to maintain control in the United States' and Britain's own interests (see "A mission impossible," 7 February 2008).
Away from these areas of direct combat, however, another strategic dilemma faced by the architects of the war on terror is becoming increasingly visible. This involves developments in asymmetric warfare - the ability of the weak to take up arms against the strong - which are already changing the global pattern of armed operations and counterinsurgency in ways still largely unrecognized. The United States army, and other powerful armies, find this form of warfare particularly difficult to cope with, as it can utilise in highly effective ways the advantages of an imbalance of forces and a surplus of targets..
The ability of extreme movements to undertake mass casualty attacks is already formidable; so also is their developing capacity to strike at the vulnerable underpinnings of advanced industrial economies - in short, economic targeting. This was seen in the attack on the world's largest oil-processing plant, the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia, on 24 February 2006 (see "Abqaiq's warning," 2 March 2006).
The Saudi response to the Abqaiq attack has been rapidly to develop a new 35,000-strong security force devoted entirely to protecting the country's energy infrastructure; this decision is paralleled by one to allow the United States fifth fleet to guard the world's largest oil export terminal, at Ras Tanura (see "Abqaiq's message to Washington," 9 November 2006).
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- A communiqué from Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, the al-Qaida leader in Iraq, focused on targeting the Iraqi economy: "Cut off their communications by blowing up the towers and the land telephone exchanges and destroy the bridges and the important highways they use" (see Amit R Paley, "Shift in Tactics to Revive Struggling Insurgency," Washington Post, 8 February 2008). As if on cue, a series of explosions hit a natural-gas pipeline near Kirkuk and a generating station in Mosul, causing widespread disruption of power supplies across much of the country (see Steven R Hurst, "Blasts Show Tenacity of Al-Qaeda in Iraq," Philadelphia Enquirer, 12 February 2008)
- In Pakistan, a confident Taliban leader states: "Just a few steps would be enough to break the binding forces of the country, and then it will fall into our hands. For instance, there are two major [oil] refineries in the country. If we were to blow them, the country would face a severe energy. Everything would come to a halt and riots would erupt (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, "Revolt
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