January, 2002

The Unbalanced War between the United States and Al-Qaida

Mohammed Abdel-Salam

The main challenge for the United Stated after the 11 September attacks was the means by which it could counter the new source of threat. Unlike the case with Iraq and Serbia, the Al-Qaida group is not a country that can be dealt with as an organised power - a strategy that proved influential during the Gulf War (1991) and the Kosovo War (1999). Al-Qaida has no organised army or strategic targets. Moreover, the organisation is not an ordinary armed terrorist group that could have been dealt with by methods of security bodies and Special Forces, as used to be the case in Latin America. Al-Qaida is what is called in international relations a non-governmental actor, and it has high organisational and financial capabilities and violent tendencies. This constitutes a real threat to the common principles of security and defence inside US institutions.

When the George Bush administration assumed power, it continued with the strategies set for the confrontation of non-organisational threats within the framework of more general national security strategies. The most important of these strategies is represented in the concept of the unbalanced war, which is based on the assumption that no country had the ability to wage a conventional or even non-conventional war against the United States. Yet US national security still faces serious threats as a result of other developments taking place in the international arena, the most pressing of which is terrorism.

According to the definition of former US chief of staff Henry Shelton, the unbalanced war is the attempt of an enemy of the United States to avoid direct confrontation with US power and make use of its points of weakness by deploying totally unfamiliar methods. This applies to the series of operations executed by members of Al-Qaida over the past few years. These operations were not typical terrorist attacks such as assassination of public figures, hijacking of planes or the bombing of cars or buildings. The sophisticated operations of Al-Qaida were marked with a high degree of professionalism. This applies to the attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole in Aden in October 2000.

The principles of non-conventional war were theoretical until last September's incidents and the ensuing war. Enforcing appropriate retaliatory procedures demands the full cooperation of intelligence agencies and political alliances as well as abundant financial aid, tools of psychological warfare and of course the armed forces. In this regard, the US attacks on Tora Bora in Afghanistan represent a perfect instance of the use of military power in the framework of an unbalanced war. These attacks have also re-determined the framework of limits in which military power can attain success in the confrontation of organised terrorism, and this will definitely affect future terrorist trends.