What Kind of War?

Part 1: Who is the Enemy?

US President George W. Bush and others have warned Americans that the attacks on New York and Washington have begun a "new kind of war". But what kind? The devastating attacks, particularly the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, appear to have cost more American lives than any single day of battle in the country's history, and most of those lives were civilian. Clearly the American public is demanding a response and some sense of retribution. Clearly too, that poses problems. The Administration seems unwilling to engage in purely symbolic responses, like the Tomahawk attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998 after the African Embassy bombings, since these do nothing to reduce the threat. Clearly too, the nature of the presumed enemy is unconventional, and transnational as well. Clearly too, an indiscriminate approach which produces large-scale civilian casualties abroad but does not remove the threat would alienate or destabilize friendly Islamic countries without eliminating the problem.

There is only one state actor clearly in the line of fire at the moment: Afghanistan. Conventional military force, to the extent that it is used at all, will presumably be directed there, despite the obvious constraints on any country seeking to operate in that failed state. Attempts to occupy any significant part of Afghan territory for longer than brief search-and-destroy missions face the danger of becoming entangled in the sort of war which defeated Britain twice in the 19th Century and the Soviet Union, despite ruthless tactics, decisively in the 1980s. As for other forms of military pressure, there is little to be gained from bombing alone; the objective is presumably the removal of key individuals, who are presumably dispersed at the moment. And while one might inflict punishment on the Afghan government through a bombing campaign, the victims would not be likely to include the real enemy. And even a Curtis LeMay-style attempt to "bomb them back into the Stone Age" would hardly be effective in a country which is already nearly there.

While there will doubtless be conventional military components in the US response, it seems that a combination of more unconventional approaches — covert action to disrupt networks and infrastructure, attempts to trace and block financial resources, cooperation with other nations to root out cells in their territory, and perhaps quick-strike special operations against specific targets such as training camps — are likely to characterize this unconventional war.

This is the first of several Dossiers — which may or may not run one after the other depending on the speed of events — devoted to various aspects of the US campaign and its international and regional implications. It begins with the most obvious challenge inherent in the problem: identifying the enemy.

John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address, referred to the Cold War as a "long twilight struggle", but in fact the Cold War was "fought" in the full glare of international publicity compared to the struggle against international non-state players like the federation of radical groups associated with Usama bin Ladin. Covert and unconventional wars are, like any other war, subject to the fundamental principles of war, and some of these (surprise, economy of force, mass) are clearly applicable. But the principle of war which is listed first in modern Western military thought is the objective. And as Clausewitz noted in the quotation which leads the introduction, no one in their right mind goes into a war without a clearly defined objective. Many critics of the Vietnam War, the one war which the United States can clearly be said to have lost, have blamed the lack of a defined objective and fuzziness about how to reach one which was both militarily and politically realizable, for the war's loss.

Assuming that the "War on Terrorism" is intended to be a real war, not a public relations effort like the "Wars" on Poverty, or Drugs, or other evils, then it needs to follow the rules of real war. Rhetorical excess about ending terrorism everywhere and forever must give way to a clearly defined objective which can be realized with available or obtainable assets, and which the political will of the American electorate and US allies are prepared to sustain. Rooting out terrorism forever is actually rather nonsensical, since terror is a tactic, not an organization.

The lead story on Page One seeks to make the point that those who call for too broad and sweeping a campaign against terrorism in general risk diluting the effort to destroy the specific networks behind the attacks on the United States. Leaving aside some of the more rabid expressions of outrage and the more predictable op-ed authors' calls for a global crusade, however, the issue remains of how to define the enemy in this case.

Understanding the Enemy
One of the oldest prescriptions for preparing for war remains one of the best; in The Art of War attributed to Sun Tsu (or Sun Zi, said to have lived in the 5th century BC), we hear: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril." (Griffith translation — cited on Page One as well — p.84.)

Understandably, in the first days after the attacks on New York and Washington, much was said and written about the presumed perpetrators which can hardly be called a cool assessment. From President Bush downward, several called the terrorists "cowards". Whatever other adjective may be appropriate — fanatic, deluded, ruthless — surely men who will coolly fly an aircraft into a building knowing that they as well as their victims are about to die are not cowards. And apparently 19 plotters were on those aircraft, men who had spent years preparing for the act. To think of them as cowards is to underrate the real menace and lethality of the threat. We may not understand the motivations of the kamikaze, but World War II veterans who watched Japanese pilots fly their aircraft into the American fleet at Okinawa never called their adversaries cowards, for they had seen evidence to the contrary.

Once one appreciates that one's adversaries are not cowards, one is less likely to make the mistake of assuming that they will run when attacked. They will retreat and regroup, to be sure, but they will not abandon their efforts. The worst mistake is to assume that they are not indeed very dangerous and very ruthless, as well as very determined and skillful.

It is also essential to define the enemy narrowly enough to have an achievable target. The United States cannot eliminate terrorism around the globe, and therefore should not pretend to try. An objective too broadly defined does not lend itself to the design of a war plan; the US needs to refine and define its objective into an achievable one. It should carefully target the perpetrators, but even that may not be easy to achieve.

Bin Ladin the Man as a Target
If, as seems almost certain as this is written, the fingerprints of Usama bin Ladin and his organization(s) are all over the plot, that provides a framework for an answer, but not a complete answer in itself. It might be possible to kill or capture Bin Ladin, or force Afghanistan to turn him over, but that does not disassemble a complex network of organizations scattered across the Middle East, Europe, East Asia and North America. Eliminating or neutralizing the man would be a powerful symbol of American will and power, no doubt, but it would not necessarily end the danger.

Bin Ladin did not create most of the groups which follow him; he has been their coordinator and financier, but most already existed before he brought them into a cooperative venture. Egypt's Jihad Organization, for example, was involved in the Anwar Sadat assassination in 1981 and the uprising at Asyut in Upper Egypt in that year, at a time when Bin Ladin was a mujahid in Afghanistan. Jihad's overseas operations, or at least those led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, may not have been fully integrated with Bin Ladin's operations until 1998, though they clearly had been linked earlier. Today, Zawahiri (Profile) may be Bin Ladin's chief of operations.

It is important, too, to remember that Bin Ladin himself is the visible leader and symbol of these groups, but not necessarily the "mastermind" sometimes implied by the West. Few believe that he is the operations man; Zawahiri seems to have more experience and skill in that field. When Bin Ladin issued a denial that he had "planned" the New York and Washington attacks, he may have been telling the truth, in the sense that he is not usually portrayed as a man who plans the operations. Bin Ladin, unlike most terrorist organizers historically, has been fond of giving interviews; his more shadowy colleagues do not. ("Carlos" and other notorious terrorists never did interviews with CNN.)

If Bin Ladin is removed from the scene, then, others would continue to stage operations. In fact, for much of the past year, the region has been full of rumors that Bin Ladin was seriously ill (variously cancer, bone marrow disease, liver or kidney problems, etc.). If there is any truth to these rumors (and they may be disinformation), it is even possible that he envisioned the American attacks as a sort of farewell performance. But he would have successors.

He has been the financier, to be sure, but the several hundred million dollars he inherited from the family's great wealth has, by some accounts, been largely expended. Other sources of income, however, provide revenues not dependent on Bin Ladin's personal survival: the opium crop in Afghanistan is widely reported to be part of the funding, as are continued contributions by some Saudi and Gulf businessmen of radical leanings, and at presstime there were reports that Germany and Japan were investigating possible manipulation of the stocks of major international re-insurance firms through short-selling shortly before the attacks, presumably by some organization or person with foreknowledge of the plot.

In short, Bin Ladin may no longer be essential even as the banker of the movement. That does not mean that he should not be the initial target of any attempt to dismantle his operations: clearly, targeting the central command and control is where one begins. It simply means that one cannot stop there, for the survival of such an operation was from the beginning based on decentralization and a cell system in which few if any individuals know all the members. Cutting off one of the hydra's heads does not destroy the organization.

And in the Bin Laden case, that organization is also based on a federation or confederation of pre-existing organizations, ranging from some which have an actual track record of operations (like Egyptian Jihad), to some which were little more than "fax fronts" issuing communiqués before they were able to take advantage of Bin Ladin's wealth and training camps. Those organizations could resume an independent existence.

That is why the effort to eliminate the movement will not be an easy one. The leadership, or at least some of it, is in Afghanistan, a country notorious for defeating invaders; so the United States should not invade in a conventional sense. Future parts of this series of Dossiers will look more closely at tactics for fighting an organization or organizations like those apparently involved. Limited use of special forces, combined with covert operations, efforts to disrupt the financial and communciations networks of these groups, and efforts to undermine their hosts, may be more effective than raw military force, though some use of military force to either pressure or undermine the Taliban may be appropriate.

Dealing with Afghanistan
Clearly, since Bin Ladin is the most obvious initial target and Bin Ladin is in Afghanistan, US planning seems to be focusing on possible operations there. But there are few countries less amenable to conventional military action than Afghanistan. You can scarcely degrade an infrastructure which has been virtually destroyed by 22 years of war. You cannot, as noted earlier, "bomb them back into the Stone Age" since, in effect, they are almost there already. The population is already plagued by famine, and any conventional campaign risks creating innocent civilian casualties without getting the real target. And the specter of the "retreats from Kabul" of the British and Soviets should haunt any military planner looking at Afghanistan.

It may be possible to undermine the Taliban power base, but not by conventional military means. The Taliban came to power in part by winning over a variety of local warlords and militia leaders, some of whom had little ideological attraction to the Taliban beliefs, and who might change alignment again if it is clearly in their interests to do so. But an overt invasion of US forces moving onto Afghan soil for anything other than brief search-and-destroy operations might encourage the Taliban to portray the US as an invader in the British and Soviet traditions, and appeal to Afghan nationalism to solidify their power base. (They already benefit from an appeal to Pushtun nationalism, and the fact that their remaining opponents are Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and Turkmens makes it easier to portray themselves as Pushtun nationalists.)

That does not, of course, mean that nothing can be done. Ahmad Shah Mas‘ud was by far the best and most skillful commander the anti-Taliban forces had, and he had survived for decades despite massive efforts by the Soviet Union and later by his Afghan adversaries to capture or kill him. In the end, he died as the victim of two suicide bombers who look suspiciously like they may have been Bin Ladin associates. (See Defense Briefs.) Covert operations are certainly going to be part of any campaign against Bin Ladin, and might play a role in a campaign against the Taliban as well.

Since the US intelligence services are notoriously short on human intelligence assets in the field, allied or friendly inteligence services, or even those somewhat unfriendly but with a deep dislike of the Taliban, might be more appropriate in such a campaign. That is another reason for not defining the objective too broadly.

It is not impossible that one of the more nimble intelligence services with assets inside Afghanistan at the moment (leaving Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence out of the equation for obvious reasons) might be Iran's. Russian, Uzbek and Tajik services might be useful as well. India maintains useful intelligence because of the role of Afghanistan in training Kashmiri rebels. None of these assets should be dismissed for purely political reasons. The US allied with Josef Stalin against Hitler, and has a long history of supporting or allying with "lesser evils" in various conflicts. It may be time to do so again.

As noted in the lead story, not all these elements of cooperation need to be publicized. Pakistan's cooperation may depend on a lack of visible Indian involvement; Israeli support could undermine Arab world enthusiasm for the undertaking. Iran's involvement could become a factor in the internal power struggle there. But precisely because the help needed is mostly in the intelligence field, cooperation need not be on public display.

US leaders have said, rightly, that the task will not be easy or short. That is more or less inevitable given the global nature of the organizations being attacked and their decentralized operations. But if the enemy is carefully defined, and "mission creep" is not allowed to divert or distract from the objective set, the objective is more likely to be accomplished.

Since terrorism is a tactic rather than a definable object, "terrorism" in the abstract cannot be the target. The Bin Ladin organization, and its allies, and those states supporting it if, besides Afghanistan, any can be identified, are the objectives of any such campaign.

Bin Ladin the man, however, is probably not a sufficient target. Almost certainly he is a product of his own reputation, a banker and organizer but not the conceptual and operational designer of some of these operations attributed to his network. He is one of the figures who must be neutralized, but not the only one.

Thus the objective should not be so broad, or the enemy so fuzzily defined, as to be unachievable; but at the same time it must not be so narrowly drawn (bring Usama bin Ladin alone to justice, for example) that it does not remove the actual perpetrators of the attacks on the United States. Striking that balance may not be easy, but little will be easy in such a campaign.

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