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Gaffney Describes How to Win the War on Terror


Special guest at DFF’s Forum Congressman Ed Royce (CA-40) asks Frank Gaffney about broadcasting into closed regimes.

  

The friends we can rely on are those who are not governed by a ruler, who one day decides to be on your side, but by people who share our values which also makes them targets for the Islamists. Our friends are Great Britain, Australia, Israel, Japan, and the countries that have seen what it is like to live enslaved and know how important it is to preserve that freedom they so recently won back. These countries are what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld describes as the “New Europe.”

Third: You must take the war to the enemy – using both offensive military and nonmilitary means. “The reality is that in an open society like ours, it is simply impossible to defend everything we care about against people who are determined to attack it and willing to kill themselves in the process of attacking it,” said Gaffney. “Therefore, you must take the war to them, and in particular to those that provide this safe haven, training, technical support, and intelligence.”

In terms of non-military offensive activities, the Center for Security Policy began in August a campaign entitled DivestTerror.org to disrupt terrorist operations and put hostile regimes out of business by ensuring that financial resources are prevented from being made available to terrorists. So far, $135 million that might otherwise have flowed to terrorist organizations has been divested. Gaffney pointed out that his Center had found that of the 100 leading public pension funds including pension funds that represent members of the armed services, policemen, firemen, state employees, about $200 billion is being invested by Americans unwittingly in companies that partner with terrorist regimes. Citing South Africa twenty years ago, he said a similar divestment campaign could bring about changes not only in the behavior but in the character of hostile states.

Fourth: Do everything we can to defend ourselves at home. “We need to ensure that we have missile defenses in place that can defend against both an electromagnetic pulse attack (see Forum pages 8-9) as well as to protect against Scud missiles which could be brought relatively close to our shores and launched from any of Al Queda’s twenty ships.” said Gaffney.

Fifth: We must have the support of the American people on a sustained basis for everything that must be done to win the war on terror. He explained it was important for the United States to become energy independent because a very high correlation of our enemies are our source of oil.


Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney addressing DFF’s Capitol
Hill Forum.

 


Frank Gaffney, President of the Center for Security Policy, addressed the topic “What Will It Take To Win the War on Terror?” Gaffney explained that there were five important aspects to consider. First: Clearly understand who your enemy is. The principal source of the terror we confront at the moment is a community of people who subscribe to a hostile ideology, as distinct from a theology. Gaffney explained that the 9/11 Commission recognized that the source of terror today in our world is Islamism, a radical strain of the Islamic faith that is really an ideology, not a theology, whose goal is to subordinate the rest of that faith to its ideology; and therefore it is a threat both to Muslims as much as to the rest of the world.

Second: Know who your friends are. “A decisive ingredient in defeating that enemy is going to be the non-Islamists in the Muslim faith who are at risk from this ideology,” explained Gaffney, “and who I believe do not share the tenets of intolerance, its jihadism, its propensity for violence.” We need to make common cause with them by empowering them, by helping to defend them, and by raising them up at a time when many are either intimidated or coerced into keeping their heads down.

What makes our enemy so dangerous is their connection to states that sponsor terror, that give them safe haven, intelligence, training facilities, logistical support, materiel support, arms, and potentially weapons of mass destruction.

Gaffney pointed out that “we have got to be clear about countries that have their own despotic regimes, that may at a given moment find themselves allied with the terrorists only to conclude the next day that it’s more convenient or more lucrative, politically advantageous to be allied with us.” He cited countries like Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia who are now with us in the war on terror but who have in the past been very much with our enemies. “Relying upon them as friends is a very dubious proposition,” he said. “I think the same thing can be said of China...which is at best a pure competitor, and at worst an incipient enemy (see Forum).”

 

  


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