A Prospect of One War After the Other

21 February 2002

America's celebrity intellectuals are now signing manifestos endorsing the war on terrorism. The country already has committees to name and shame university teachers critical of American policy.

Yet there actually has not been that much dissent. There are those opposed to the virtual abandonment of the Palestinians to the mercies of Ariel Sharon, but that debate preceded Sept. 11. There are honorable pacifist critics of any military action, and others who say that Islamic militancy comes out of poverty and American-tolerated misgovernment in the Islamic world. The latter include figures from the established left and also from the Rand Corporation, which recommends striking "at the social, economic and political roots of terrorism." But it would be hard to collect many names of influential people who are against a war on terrorism, even if they criticize how this one is conducted. The questions are practical ones: How? Where? With what methods? What about the feasibility of what you specifically intend to do? What is the situation you think you are going to have when you are finished? These are basic questions to answer before going to any war. But then war ordinarily is a matter of defeating the military forces of an identified enemy government. That is why the war against terrorism quickly turned into one against the Taliban government. That made it a tangible assignment that the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps could carry out - with a little help from the CIA.

No one yet is asking very loudly where the defeated terrorists are. Some may be in cages at Guantánamo Bay, but Osama bin Laden and major identified leaders of the Qaeda organization are either in mass graves in Afghanistan or still alive and presumably looking for trouble.

According to some officials in Washington, thousands of terrorists still roam the world, and America is in greater danger than it ever was before, even during the Cold War. If so, where is victory? Liberating the Afghans from their government was a happy result of the war against terrorism, but that certainly was not an American policy before Sept. 11.

Once again, it is to simplify matters that the war against terrorism now is apparently turning into a war against Iraq (and Iran), whose actual connection with anti-U.S. terrorism in recent years has been pretty remote: money for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, no doubt, but theirs are not the people flying airplanes into New York skyscrapers.

The United States could certainly attack and defeat the armed forces of either, or both, rout their governments, install successors, et cetera. How easily it could do it can be discussed, and who will do the real fighting - the Kurds, London or Paris-based exile groups, the U.S. Army itself? But that is part of the feasibility problem, not the policy problem.

Finally, what do you have when you are finished? The Project on Defense Alternatives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is advised by a number of responsible figures from such impeccably patriotic organizations as Rand, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Brookings Institution, has just issued a "critical appraisal" of the Afghanistan operation and what it accomplished. It finds that most of Al Qaeda's facilities and forces in Afghanistan had to do with the civil war there, while most of its terrorist capabilities were and remain elsewhere. The war drove the Taliban from power and uprooted the Qaeda organization there, but "substantial humanitarian costs were associated with these outcomes."

"Stability costs" must be added to those, since the outcome has led to "warlordism, banditry, and [revived] opium production ... In some areas virtual anarchy prevails. ... The new Afghanistan is more chaotic and less stable than the old. The task of stabilization has barely begun and remains contingent on substantial, long-term support from the outside." The United States has no intention of leaving a long-term stabilization force in the country. President Bush's father left Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq after the Gulf War because his administration anticipated exactly these kinds of problems in a defeated Iraq. Does a U.S. military intervention leave the United States, and the world, better off than before?

The elder Bush asked the question. Many in Washington today say that it doesn't matter, that what is important is to act, and the result can be forced to conform to what America wants.

The younger Bush seems to have decided. A Defense Department circular reportedly puts a stop, as of late this month, to all regular army and active reserve separations from service, in a long list of sensitive military specialties. Washington gossip has it that Iraq really is next, perhaps by summer.

William Pfaff
Published in the International Herald Tribune © 2002 the International Herald Tribune

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