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| Author: | Kenneth R. Maxwell, Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations |
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October 6, 2001
Noticia e Opinio
Jellalabad, an ancient fortress city in northeastern Afghanistan, guards the road that joins Kabul to the Indian subcontinent via the notorious Kyber Pass. In 1954 as a school boy I learned to shoot at Jellalabad. My Jellalabad, however, was a red brick replica of the original fort in Afghanistan. It stood near the center of the market town of Taunton in Southwest England and was the barracks of the Somerset Light Infantry. The army cadet force unit to which I belonged was affiliated with this regiment and as a consequence we were permitted to use the old firing range at Jellalabad for target practice. In 2001, like millions of others who work in New York, I became a target. The principal bases for Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, held responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center, are said to be located around Jellalabad.
As the British army was downsized and became a fully volunteer force, the Somerset Light Infantry, like many old regiments, was merged in the late 1950s. The Jellalabad barracks was eventually abandoned. I vaguely remembered that the royal blue facings and the style of our ceremonial sashes had been awarded, we were told, following the first Afghan War when the regiment held Jellalabad. So I checked up on the history.
In 1842 the British “Army of the Indus” with 38,000 camp followers and 30,000 camels had marched into Afghanistan to set a pliant puppet ruler on the throne, and old and weak ruler who had been deposed some 30 years before. Poorly led, overly self confident, and facing a widespread uprising led by the mullahs, the British were forced into a humiliating capitulation at Kabul. As they retreated over the mountainous ninety-mile stretch between the Afghan capital and Jellalabad they were cut to pieces by Afghan tribesmen. 17,000 perished, European and Indian soldiers and 12,000 camp followers; only one man, Dr. William Brydon, an army surgeon, reached Jellalabad alive. It was the most humiliating disaster that the British army suffered anywhere and at anytime.
The Somerset Light Infantry, besieged at Jellalabad held out over a bitter winter. The following spring a new army was sent from British India to wreak vengeance on Kabul. The punitive expedition seized the Afghan capital and destroyed the great covered Bazaar of Kabul, one of the wonders of Asia. The British then withdrew, recognizing on the throne of Afghanistan the very ruler they had intervened to overthrow five years before. He proved to be a reliable albeit independent ally for the next 35 years—until the late 1870s when the British repeated their error and the second Afghan war took place with similar results to the first. This was the famous occasion when the besieged British General Roberts telegraphed the Viceroy of India for “reinforcements, tea and sugar.”
In recognition for holding out at Jellalabad in 1842 and providing what little honor the British retained after that first disastrous Afghan adventure the young Queen Victoria had ordered that the Somerset Light Infantry should be known as “Prince Albert’s own” after her beloved German husband. The regiment took “Jellalabad” as the motto for its regimental crest. The yellow facings of the infantry were replaced with royal blue, the only non-royal regiment granted this right, and the incongruous replica of the fortress of Jellalabad was built in Taunton.
The first Afghan war is very much back in focus, not only in Washington but also in Kabul. Afganistan was the locus classicus of the “great game” where the imperial powers jockeyed for geo-strategic advantage in a faraway, imperfectly understood, inhospitable and dangerous place, almost always to little effect. Intervention, betrayal, massacre, and retribution became the dreary reality of those desolate mountain passes over the centuries. In the end their game was not worth playing; a “tournament of shadows” and Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac so aptly call it in a splendid recent book on the competition for empire in Central Asia. [http://www.tournamentofshadows.com ]
Two conclusions can be drawn from the experience of the Afghan wars. The first was that foreigners who invaded Afghanistan with territorial ambitions would unite the disparate Afghan tribes and ethnicities against them; and that even if the Afghans did not love each other, they loved the infidel less. The second lesson was that the exercise of skillful political influence, the use of inducements to build alliances, and the threat of credible punitive military force could, if the seizure of territory was not an objective, sustain regimes in Kabul which, if not allies, were at least not host to enemies. The British were by this logic obliged in their dealings with Afghanistan to prefer “influence” to “occupation.” It was in many ways the origin of the concept of “indirect rule” where the British keep traditional hierarchies in place and exercised their power from behind the throne. Soviet Russia in the 1980s forgot the first of these lessons about Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is evidently hoping that the United States will now make the same mistake in 2001.
In the final analysis this is perhaps what the terrorist assault on U.S. territory was all about: to set a trap, precisely to provoke an intervention, not as President Bush said after the terrorist assault on the United States, where the United States “will choose the time and place” to retaliate, but where bin Laden has already set himself up as a tempting target. It was and is a mistake to call bin Laden and his acolytes “cowards.” This misses the essential fact of their motivation. The suicide squads that took over the civilian airlines out of Logan Airport in Boston and Dulles Airport in Virginia on September 11, 2001, and turned them into manned cruise missiles did not fear death. Nor does bin Laden. He invites it, in fact, if he can, by his death, provoke a reaction from the West that will unite the Muslim world against the West and thereby stir up so much opposition in the streets to the remaining secular government of the major Muslim states of Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Jordan as to bring about their overthrow and substitution by anti-Western Islamic fundamentalist regimes.
This trap is almost impossible for the United States to avoid. Political leaders in democracies find it very difficult indeed not to respond promptly with decisive action to the murder of so many citizens, going about their business, struck down with savage finality on a perfect cloudless morning. In Washington, DC, the humiliating gash in the side of the Pentagon is a daily reminder of the audacity, success and ruthlessness of the challenge.
One certainty about what happened in New York and Washington on September 11 should be self evident: it is that the United States has very poor intelligence on bin Laden and his terrorist network not only within Afghanistan but about the specific targets he has chosen to strike, or when, or where these might be. It is also self-evident, or at least should be by now be, that the terrorists have very good intelligence and understanding of the United States, its capabilities, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities, and, one must assume, the predictability of its response. Since bin Laden planned his action and positioned his strike forces in complete secrecy and was able to set the time and place for the assault, totally undetected by the world’s most sophisticated and expensive intelligence gathering organization, it is not too much to expect that he planned for the aftermath with equal thoroughness. He must always have counted on a punitive military strike against Afghanistan by his enemies.
Yet any U.S. military response—if it is to be successful in the extremely hostile geographical terrain of Afghanistan—will be entirely hostage to the accuracy and timeliness of the intelligence the United States has on the ground. It is unlikely that even the most “can do” U.S. generals will be foolish enough to follow the 1842 example of the British Army of Indus and undertake a permanent land invasion of Afghanistan or contemplate holding territory there, other, that is, than for the relatively short period required to seize bin Laden and destroy his headquarters. But for this to succeed reliable cooperation will be needed from the fractious Afghani guerrilla forces opposed to the Taliban regime which protects bin Laden, or even from within the Taliban itself if bribes or other incentives can be offered and are accepted. This has proved elusive and unreliable in the past, but it has sometimes worked. U.S. Special Forces have the training, capacity, and tools to do the job, as does the British SAS (Special Air Service), but they need to know exactly where they are going and they need an element of surprise. Achieving this in Afghanistan will be a monumental challenge.
Bin Laden also knows that the track record of the U.S. military in recent special operations is not good. The botched U.S. rescue attempt to free the U.S. hostages in Tehran in 1979, for example; the experience of Panama in 1989-90 where, despite the overwhelming presence of U.S. armed forces in place and an intimate knowledge of the country, it took the United States nearly two weeks to find General Noriega; or the disastrous hunt for the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Mogadishu in 1992-93; not to mention the comic opera of the first aborted landing in Haiti where opposition was derisory. Bin Laden must calculate that the United States does not have the stomach for such a fight; much less once blooded. This also means, unfortunately, that the first U.S. soldiers captured by the al Qaeda or the Taliban will be treated with inhuman atrocity, the results of which will be fed to the voracious media to be repeated ad nauseam for audiences at home. A land operation in Afghanistan, therefore, brief as it may be, promises to be the most severe test of will. The old hands in Washington know this, which is why they ask for “patience” and warn so persistently that this is not an easy fight nor one where there will be no casualties. They also know, for this reason among others, that this first battle of the twenty-first century is not one they can afford to lose.
To fight on the ground in Afghanistan or to provide effective logistical and military support to the Taliban’s Afghan enemies, U.S. and British forces need launching pads close by for the projection of military force into Afghanistan. Thus, the cooperation of Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan to the east and Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to the north, to permit the use of bases is also essential. These partners are far from being ideal; none are democracies, all face internal opposition from Islamic fundamentalists. Each of these neighbors of Afghanistan has a high incentive in preserving their own domestic stability, and it is greatly in their interest that bin Laden be neutralized, captured, or given up by means of diplomacy and not by war. Washington obviously hopes that bluster, combined with marshalling a credible threat of military action, as well as clandestine subornation and support for Taliban enemies within Afghanistan, will persuade the Taliban to give up their Arab “guests.” But the time for such persuasion is short: the ferocious winter in Afghanistan will soon close in, making the military option even more daunting.
Russia is a key component in any military response. The approximation between the United States and Russia over Afghanistan has the makings of a diplomatic revolution. If consummated this new de facto alliance will be no less dramatic in its consequences than the diplomatic revolution which occurred in mid eighteenth-century Europe when alliances between the great powers shifted making old allies enemies and old enemies friends. If such a dramatic shift in U.S. or Russian relations is consolidated, it will mark the most significant reordering of international relations since the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War in 1918. The Bush Administration is rich in officials with solid experience in Russian affairs. Before September 11 this seemed to ill-prepare them for a new world dominated by economics. Today it may allow them to complete the rapprochement with Russia they began during the administration of president Bush’s father. If George W. Bush has been consistent in one thing since he took office in January it is in letting the Russians know that for the United States the “Cold War is over.”
The causes for the Russian reaction to the terrorist assault of New York and Washington are fairly obvious and motivated by self interest, but such are the forces that always make for diplomatic revolutions. Russia, after all, has old scores to settle in Afghanistan and faces continuing opposition from the Chechens who promote terrorist attacks within Russia against civilians. Russian support will be essential if the United States is to obtain vital staging areas for any effective military intervention in Central Asia, as well as providing de facto approval for the former Soviet republics—Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—that lie across the northern borders of Afghanistan to provide the staging bases for U.S. or British special forces. If these military overt and covert operations are successful, then a new “post-Cold War paradigm” will indeed have been established. In the process it will mark a major shift in U.S. policy: away from the soft days of fuzzy Clintonianism; back to realpolitik.
The events of September 11 have led to a revival of a sense of solidarity between the developed countries, especially between Europe and the United States. Within the European Community public opinion polls show high levels of support for taking part with the United States in a military response: two-thirds in most countries, including France which stands at only a few percent points lower than British support (79%), which is traditionally always high. This stands in striking contrast to the opinion polls in Brazil, for example, where that same percentage of the population is against military retaliation and 78% oppose a Brazilian participation in any military action. [ http://www.uol.com.br/fsp/especial/fj2309200104.htm ] This Western European support in a war against terrorism is understandable; Britain, Germany, France, and Spain have all suffered terrorist attacks in recent years, many of them causing heavy civilian loss of life. Yet opinion polls also show strong support for the extradition of bin Laden and his terrorists to stand trial and low tolerance for any punitive strikes that involve the killing of large numbers of civilians.
[ http://www.gallupinternational.net/surveys.htm ]
The battle, of course, will not only be fought “overseas.” Striking back at bin Laden in Afghanistan is only part of the conundrum that faces President George W. Bush and his advisers. What is new in the situation confronting the United States since September 11, 2001, is that a terrorist assault of total surprise and unexpected magnitude was carried out on its home territory, an assault wholly unprecedented in the scale of the civilian death toll. Domestic terrorism is certainly not new; Oklahoma City is the worst case. And a foreign terrorist attack within the United States is also not unprecedented; the World Trade Center itself was attacked before in 1993. Several U.S. blue-ribbon commissions, charged with looking at the terrorist threat and with making recommendations as to what was needed in terms of counter measures, had also warned of the possibilities of a catastrophic terrorist attack aimed at killing the maximum number of people.
[ /Public/media/attack_links.html ] But while these reports were probably read by the terrorists, the U.S. government and Congress remained unmoved, unresponsive, and during the 1990s focused on the distribution of the spoils of prosperity rather than the “what ifs” laid out so soberly by the distinguished former senators, retired generals, and think tank denizens who composed these panels.
These commissions, moreover, focused their attention almost exclusively on nuclear, chemical, and biological threats to the civilian population, all of which remain to this day frightening possibilities. What no one anticipated was the audacity of the scale of attacks when they came: none of these commissions, as the saying goes, “thought outside the box.” And while it is easy to lay blame with hindsight, it is but unfair to do so. The sheer magnitude of the simultaneous assaults on New York and Washington is entirely new for the United States. The loss of the sense of immunity from the world and vulnerability to its travails is utterly profound.
The recommendations of these anti-terrorist commissions, nonetheless, have been taken down from the shelves and dusted off to form the background of many of the ideas that have quickly been put forward in the aftermath of the Pentagon and World Trade Center disasters. Some of these ideas are good, some bad. They basically frame the debate on domestic as opposed to foreign responses to the terrorist attacks. What are the bad ideas? Rash talk, for example, about the assassination of foreign leaders, as if the whole sad farce of exploding cigars dispatched via the Mafia to eliminate Fidel Castro, or the debilitating strain on the good name of the United States that resulted from the cozy relationships cultivated with murderous regimes from Guatemala to Chile had never happened. Expanding the police and surveillance power of the state exponentially without careful assessment of the consequences also had a sorry history replete with overreactions that rarely served to prevent terrorism or catch spies, from the Red Scare and Palmer Raid of the 1920s to McCarthyism in the 1950s. And none of these reactions will tell us much about what went wrong on September 11, 2001, an essential starting place for any inquiry.
Again some things should be obvious. First is the chronic lack of coordination between and within agencies and departments of the U.S. government concerned with national defense and public safety. Second is the culture of avoiding responsibility that permeates the U.S. bureaucracy, some part of it caused by the litigious culture of the United States to be sure. The most obvious measures for airport security, for example, long known to be slack in the United States compared with Europe, were never implemented, a factor to which any frequent traveler can bear witness. At Boston Logan Airport security was a patronage job—its chief was the former chauffer of the governor of Massachusetts. Here too the ideology of the market can reach the point of absurdity, with politicians opposing the standardization of airport security under federal authority on the grounds that this is an attempt to “socialize” functions best left to the private sector. If anything, the events of September 11 have shown the complete inadequacy, long known to anybody who has looked into the subject, of delegating this vital task to commercial companies who spent as little as they could on insuring basic safety to their passengers: the same companies that now seek to recover tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout, where tens of thousands of dollars spent wisely earlier might have prevented catastrophe. And these billions in bailouts for the airlines are only a beginning to the financial impact on a weakened economy of bin Laden’s attacks.
Public opinion polls show that 90 percent of the American public support President Bush’s performance—the highest of any U.S. president. More than 85 percent in favor of military action of some sort against the perpetrators of these horrors. With the full impact of the thousands of deaths of innocent people going about their daily lives only now beginning to be more broadly comprehended, especially in New York, the incentive for quick and swift decisive action is enormous. Yet what is needed is a stiletto, not a steamroller. The big question over the next several weeks will be which of these the United States chooses to use, not only in terms of its military intervention overseas but also in its domestic response. A steamroller approach that demonizes the Islamic world and unites it can only play into the fundamentalists’ hands, and it will surely solidify opposition to the West. Curtailing the West’s most cherished and hard-won historical achievement, the protection of individual liberties, will equally surely give victory to those who fear such liberties most.
Thinking back to my schoolboy visits to the Jellalabad barracks all those years ago for target practices, I recalled the admonition from the duty sergeant of the armory as I was checking out the rifles and ammunition for my squad. I had signed a manifest at the bottom of the sheet. The sergeant placed his large hand over the expanse of white paper between my signature and the end of the list of munitions. “Never sign a blank paper” he told me gravely. “Anything can be filled in the space you have left empty and only you will be held responsible.” From that day forth I never have, though until today I had forgotten precisely why. In a spirit of national solidarity and community so palpable in these sober weeks since September 11, the American people are signing a lot of blank pages with President Bush in the hope that he knows what he is doing.
Notícia e Opinião
http://maxwell.no.com.br
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