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 hen
it comes to America's ongoing war to destroy al Qaeda and topple
the Taliban, any outcome short of decisive victory is simply unacceptable.
But as President Bush and other members of his administration have
repeatedly emphasized, the present conflict is not simply an isolated
challenge to be confronted and overcome so that life can return
to normal. There will be no such return. Colin Powell has rightly
noted that, after just slightly more than a decade, the prodigal
era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall has ended. The events
of September 11 plunged the United States into a menacing new age
of insecurity, in which we are destined to live out our days.
Thus, the ongoing
Afghan war not only marks the Pentagon's response to the attack
of September 11; it also provides a preliminary assessment of the
nation's capacity to address the dangers awaiting it in this new
era. In that regard, the war's first weeks offer little cause for
comfort. Based on the available evidence, it appears that the world's
most generously endowed and best-trained military forces lack the
tools — conceptual as well as material — to deal effectively
with the enemies we face. The conceptual deficit may be greater
than the material one; it is not our weapons that have been found
most seriously wanting in Afghanistan, but the ideas underpinning
a deeply flawed "American Way of War."
President Bush
has labeled the present struggle the "first war of the 21st
century." Yet his administration's approach to waging that
war does not differ appreciably from the methods on which the U.S.
relied to wage the last wars of the previous century — namely,
the sundry minor military adventures concocted by the Clinton administration
during the '90s. In Operation Enduring Freedom, the Clinton legacy
at its most pernicious lives on.
Beginning in
1993 with its failed war in Somalia and continuing until Bill Clinton's
last day in office — an occasion coinciding with U.S. air strikes
against Iraq, all but unnoticed because they had become so commonplace
— the Clinton administration evolved a distinctive way of employing
U.S. military power. The hallmarks of this Clinton Doctrine included
the following: inflated expectations about the efficacy of air power,
administered in carefully calibrated doses; a pronounced aversion
to even the possibility of U.S. casualties, combined with an acute
sensitivity to "collateral damage" (the media converted
these into the chief criteria by which to "grade" any
operation); a reliance on proxies to handle the dirty work of close
combat (Croats in Bosnia, for example, or the Kosovo Liberation
Army in the war against Yugoslavia); vagueness when it came to defining
objectives (for example, bombing campaigns conducted not with expectations
of actually achieving a decision, but with an eye toward "diminishing"
an adversary's capabilities); and a tendency to convert limited
commitments into permanent obligations (remember the solemn promise
that the troops would be out of Bosnia within a year?).
Republicans
found much to dislike about this doctrine. Adding to their irritation
was the fact that the Clinton administration — its upper echelons
salted with Vietnam-era draft evaders and antiwar protesters —
had blithely discarded the hard-learned precepts regarding the use
of force that had emerged from Vietnam and were codified during
the Reagan years. Clinton and his lieutenants routinely violated
the tenets of the Weinberger Doctrine, or the Weinberger-Powell
Doctrine as it became known after the Gulf War had seemingly demonstrated
its validity for all time. The conviction that force should be reserved
for vital interests, the emphasis on overwhelming force, the crafting
of precise military objectives, the attention paid to "end
states" and "exit strategies" — all of these
commander-in-chief Clinton chucked overboard during his peripatetic
journey from Somalia to Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, with periodic
excursions against Iraq.
Among the benefits
expected to flow from the return of the Republican national-security
professionals to power in January 2001 was that this silliness would
end. A rational and principled use of force would once again become
a hallmark of U.S. policy.
In point of
fact, that has not occurred. Rather, seized by the notion that the
war against terror is completely "different" and utterly
"new," members of the Bush administration have themselves
driven the last nails into the coffin bearing the remains of Weinberger-Powell.
Thus, for example,
in the aftermath of September 11, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
instructed Americans to "Forget about 'exit strategies': We're
looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines. We
have no fixed rules about how to deploy our troops." How will
we know when we have won this sustained engagement? According to
Rumsfeld, "victory is persuading the American people and the
rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that is going
to be over in a month or a year or even five years." That is,
success lies in convincing Americans that real success will be a
long time coming.
As a practical
matter, the military bureaucracies that conduct wars cannot function
without rules. If political leaders rocked back on their heels by
the events of September 11 and its aftermath abdicate their responsibility
to provide these rules, the generals will find them elsewhere —
typically by adverting to the familiar. In short, they will fight
the next war — whatever its character — by adhering to
the routines they grew comfortable with in the last.
The Afghan
war has illustrated this penchant. As it unfolded over its first
month, Operation Enduring Freedom resembled Bill Clinton's Operation
Allied Force — the 1999 war against Yugoslavia — far more
than it did George H. W. Bush's Operation Desert Storm.
Caution and
half-heartedness — not boldness, not ferocity — have been
this campaign's signature characteristics. Despite the appalling
wounds that the nation sustained on September 11, the Bush administration
has committed to this struggle only a small fraction of America's
actual combat capabilities. Although the Bush team has not explicitly
forsworn the use of ground troops, it has — apart from a small
contingent of special-operations forces — made no preparations
to take the fight directly to the Taliban. Through the campaign's
first month, overt action by U.S. forces in (as opposed to above)
Afghanistan was confined to a single raid by a hundred or so Army
Rangers, as inconsequential as it was brief. With the Northern Alliance
unable or unwilling to take on the role of an effective proxy ground
army, the Pentagon appears to be pinning its hopes for success on
protracted aerial bombardment. Yet even as Pentagon briefers characterize
U.S. air attacks as "sustained," "continuous,"
and "intensifying," the actual level of effort has fallen
well short even of that visited upon the Serbs in 1999 — fewer
than 100 attack sorties per day. Part of the problem is that such
a backward, war-ravaged country offers a dearth of meaningful targets.
President Bush vowed that he would not expend million-dollar missiles
to knock over ten-dollar tents. But it will require the services
of a very clever accountant to make a plausible case that the bombing
of Afghanistan has been cost-effective.
None of this
means that the cause is lost. Persistence and a couple of good breaks
may yet enable the U.S. to get bin Laden and oust the Taliban. The
enemy is unlikely to be as tough as the Pentagon, in its frustration,
is making him out to be. When that victory is gained, parades and
ceremonies honoring all who contributed to it will be in order.
But once the
nation finishes patting itself on the back, the Bush administration
should turn directly to the urgent task of rethinking how the U.S.
fights its wars — devising new rules to guide the design and
deployment of American military might. This new American way of
war will not revive the tenets of Weinberger-Powell, which were
never as useful as Republicans liked to believe, except as a way
of avoiding another Vietnam. But if a return to the verities of
the 1990s will be impossible, the administration's present position
— that in this new age there are no fixed rules — is unacceptable.
It is a formula for incoherence and exhaustion.
The precepts
of the Clinton Doctrine never came close to offering an adequate
basis for thinking about the proper use of force after the Cold
War. But prior to September 11, the illusions nurtured by the likes
of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright had exacted only the occasional
penalty. After September 11, to permit the inanities of the Clinton
Doctrine to survive would be deplorable.
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