The point, it seems to me, is that the mere elimination of BenLaden is non-productive. As much as it may temporarily satisfy a present urge for vengeance for the terror raids on New York and Washington, taking BinLaden out of the picture as a battlefield casualty or by assassination or murder in custody or as the result of a Western style trial will only makes room for an other BinLaden. The true objective is to impress on foreign governments that their overt or covert support of terrorists who threaten the security of this country will necessarily cost them more than they can afford to pay. In short, there must be an object lesson.
If, as we are being told, BinLaden is behind the terror raids and if, as we are being told, Afghanistan has harbored him and his gang, we have no choice but to not only eliminate BinLaden one way or another and also to inflict such a retribution on Afghanistan that it will never again provide a safe house to any successor to BinLaden, and to impress on all other countries that the same thing will happen to them if they harbor terrorist or interfere with our efforts to punish BinLaden and Afghanistan.
Regrettably that punishment involves the death, wounding and impoverishment of many people who will be guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That however is the nature of war. This is not a business conducted with peashooters and rose water. Our national sovereignty has been intolerably insulted. Uncounted hundreds of our people have been murdered with the connivance of a foreign state. If this is so there is only one acceptable response and that is to go pound the snot out of the conniving government with out much regard for the innocents who will suffer in the process.
The psychotic blathering of Wildest Bill aside, if indeed this has been the doing of BinLaden then we are going to be compelled to pound Kabul into a fine powder, such that one stone does not stand on another. That is the simple reality of the situation. If we do not do that, or something very like it, we have no business claiming to be a nation. Our first duty is to protect our own people. Let Afghanistan protect it’s own.
I think we need to recognize the difference between the Taliban and Afghanistan. I agree that the Taliban, much like Carthage, must be destroyed. But I also think that punishing the Afghan Joe Sixpack will not resolve anything but the sating of animalistic bloodlust, and the fact that it would make future strife unavoidable. I know that if it comes to military action in Afghanistan that “collateral damage” will be unavoidable, but we need to resist the urge to, as you say, “pound Kabul into a fine powder.” People are using the phrase of bombing them “back to the stone age,” but the damn country has already had that been done to it for over 20 years. The Taliban is not exactly popular, but the Afghans have been rendered so weary since the Soviets invaded that I doubt they have the will to resist them.
Like it or not, the Taliban is the government of Afghanistan. I know of no way to winnow the Taliban , as the governing faction in control the territory, from the Afghan Joe Six-packs. If indeed binLaden is behind the terror raids and the government of Afghanistan is providing him and his organization a safe harbor and we have little opportunity to strike at binLaden and his organization then we must concentrate our efforts on the government that facilitates binLaden. In a perfect world this would not be so, but this is not a perfect world, it never has been and it is unlikely that it ever will be. We are stuck with the world as we find it.
If we strike at Afghanistan then there will be horrible destruction and people who have done the US no harm, as stated above, will be killed, wounded and impoverished, including women, children and old men. That is the nature of a military response. At best it is a crude weapon, but it is all we have. If the Afghan government’s first duty is to protect its people, it has already failed in that duty when, for the purposes of argument, it permitted binLaden and his people to set up there. It is not our duty to protect Afghans from it’s own government’s folly.
On the other hand, it is the US government’s duty to protect its own people. Right now that duty is to pound Afghanistan, and other governments who have facilitated terrorism against the US, as an object lesson not to the terrorist organizations but to the governments which might be inclined to support terrorists in the future and who are supporting them now. It makes perfect sense to me that terrorists groups cannot be effective without a friendly base of operation. The analogy is the camps the US provided in the southern US and Central America for anti-Castro and Contra guerillas. Without US support, overt and covert, those groups could not have existed. By the same token, the binLadens of this world cannot exist and cannot be a threat to the US in the absence of safe havens and at least tacit support from national sovereigns.
If anyone sees and effective alternative to punitive military action against organized governments and their populations, I would like to know about it. Sitting in the corner and wringing our hands does not seem to me to be much of an answer.
Let me just clarify one thing that I may have neglected to state earlier. Something will have to be done to deal with the Taliban, and it will very likely be a millitary action. What I think will need to be done is putting actual ground forces in Afghanistan (and yes, Vezini’s quote from the Princess Bride does pop into my head just for thinking that) to do the actual work, and it can’t be the “war by remote control” we’ve had for the past 10 years. Dropping bombs has certain tactical and strategic applications, but it does not win wars. Especially with the fact that bin Laden sleeps in a different hovel vitually every day, making bombing be more a matter of luck than skill. If you drop a bomb on a terrorist camp, all they need is a tent and maybe $40 of equipment and they start a new one. You put soldiers in there and it becomes much more difficult, because a soldier knows when he’s killed a man, a bomb does not. And also, a soldier is going to have a better idea about the difference between a combattant and a non-combattant- to a bomb they are all just targets. All of this is just conjecture, and we have to wait and see what the Taliban is going to do. I hear that they’re supposedly getting nervous, but they are also talking about retaliating if attacked.
The fact that their current government knowingly harbors terrorists, and as such is a very real threat to the US.
The US can take action against its enemies. Afghanistan is clearly an enemy of, and threat to, the US.
The Taliban, aside from being a threat to the US, is simply evil. Anything would be better.
How does the proposal to replace a government of thugs who support terrorism aginst the US somehow become the same as replacing every aspect of their culture? That’s like riding the Tuckerman’s Ravine of slippery slopes.
As I see it, to replace the Taliban with a government that will not harbor terrorists will require military action, and the death of innoents will have to be accepted as part of that. They started the war, and they are the ones responsible for putting their citizens in harm’s way. I don’t relish the prospect of innocents dieing, but that’s the way war works.
As for bin Laden, I think the best plan would be to take him out of Afghanistan through a small covert operation using Delta Force or something. Then bring him and his associates back to the US to stand trial.
Enough innocent blood has been shed. The average Afghan citizen has less to say about their government’s decision to harbor Bin Ladin than ours does. Bombing Kabul and killing Afghan women and children is IMHO the worst possible course of action.
Wars are conducted against armies, with military targets. The perpetrators of Tuesday’s acts are NOT soldiers. They are criminals and murderers. Mr. Ashcroft and the Justice Department are making great progress in identifying the people involved. These people need to be apprehended and punished as criminals, not as enemy soldiers.
Let me repeat myself, the apprehension and disposal of the terrorists them selves is a matter to be dealt with by the cloak and dagger types. It seems to me that the neutralization (to use a euphemism for murder) of individual terrorists does not solve our problem. There will be new terrorists, even suicide terrorist, to step into the breech.
It seems to me that terrorists cannot exist in the absence of some sort of support structure, which provides financing, training facilities, munitions, and subsistence as well as political and spiritual support. That essential support structure is the governments that facilitate terrorists. Our immediate problem is dealing with facilitating governments. We can fairly think that some of those governments are those that control Afghanistan, Iraq, maybe Libya, maybe Syria, maybe Iran and maybe others. We cannot fairly expect those states to abandon their support of terrorist just because the US politely requests them to do so. The government of Iraq has been fairly outspoken about its intention of supporting terrorism directed against the US and Afghanistan has been pretty ambivalent about it. Clearly both are immune to diplomatic and economic pressure. That leaves us with only a military persuader and that involves the infliction destruction, death and famine of the recalcitrant government’s territory and population.
If there is any lesson to be learned from Vietnam, the Gulf and, arguably Korea (although Korea had a much different political dynamic), it is that half measures will ultimately prove to be ineffective. This nations first duty is to protect its population. A cops and robbers operation against identified individual terrorists, even bin Laden himself, will not serve to protect the country. The safety of the country requires it to deprive the terrorist groups of their base of support and that in turn requires military action against facilitating governments.
If there is a fair historical analogy to this, look at Britain’s and to a lesser extent the US’s, campaign to suppress piracy on the high seas from the early 1700 through the early 1800. The solution was not to patrol the oceans for individual pirate crews, but to deprive them of the safe harbors on which they relied. You can hang all the Blue Beards you can catch, but piracy will continue until the pirate can no longer operate out of Charlestown, Kingston, the Barbarry Coast and New Orleans. So to here, we will have terrorists until they are deprived of their base of support. That will probably require military action in the Near East and Middle East. If the US does not do it, it will have failed in its duty.