Diminishing returns

As the "War on Terror" enters its 8th year, and the United States government rues is inability to capture Ben Ladin, its worthwhile pondering whether the neoconservative idea of trying to fight an underground problem like terrorism with an on-going, all-out campaign is an effective strategy.

Economists have many questionable ideas, but one old economic chestnut which has a lot of relevance to real world concerns is the Law of Diminishing Returns.

The idea that there is a point beyond which additional inputs of money, labour and energy result in progressively smaller benefits, is something everyone from farmers to students can relate too. But it often seems to be overlooked by right-liberal politicians and public servants.

In the Bush led campaign against Islamic terrorism there were some spectacular early successes against the Taleban forces in Afghanistan and a large number of terrorist suspects were rounded up and detained at Guantanamo Bay.

However, the longer the war has dragged on, the more difficult it has become to sustain the progress made against Al Qaeda, and the more feed up US citizens have become with the intrusions and annoyances associated with homeland security.

A similar situation has occurred in Iraq where the easy victories of the war's opening weeks have given way to a war of attrition in which further progress has become dependent on employing large numbers of troops in risky street-fighting over an extended period of time.

The "Surge" of the last few months has lead to a lessoning of hostilities, but there is no guarantee that the situation won't deteriorate when US troops are pulled out.In the 80s and 90s, the US had its first lesson in the limitations of ongoing campaigns with the so-called "War on Drugs," which has done relatively little to reduce the amount of hard drugs coming into the United States and Canada, despite attracting considerable investment from the federal government.

One of the reason why sustained campaigns like the war on terror run into diminishing returns is because they soon become predictable, and the target organisations, which are often made up of small autonomous units, quickly learn to modify their tactics. Although Al Qaeda has scaled back its operations in the West, it has now entrenched itself in Pakistan and is focusing on conducting attacks in unstable regions where US and British influence is limited.

A partial solution for the US may be to abandon predictable, on-going campaigns and focus on random surprise attacks on discrete targets. If large-scale initiatives are no longer working then take a rest and go back to the drawing board.

In the 19th Century, a cornerstone of British Imperial success was the short-term punitive expedition, where specific opponents where intimated through gunboat diplomacy.

While the US and Israel launched effective punitive expeditions against Libya and Iran in the 1980s, the Bush regime dismissed the seemingly sensible approach of punitive air-strikes in Iraq and instead chose the far more costly strategy of regime change.