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 hortly
after the September 11 attacks a colleague of mine and I were discussing
future attacks — not ours but bin Laden's. We figured that
al Qaeda had gamed various scenarios and were poised to take swift
retaliatory action as soon as the United States responded. We guessed
they had planned two, three, maybe four moves ahead. They knew our
reaction would be very determined, would have planned for that contingency,
and still been baffling us by this point. But after a few weeks
it became clear that we were giving bin Laden far more credit than
he deserved. And now with his Taliban patrons in retreat and his
network collapsing, it is obvious that bin Laden the Strategist
leaves much to be desired.
Any strategy
begins with an objective, and bin Laden's is not to create
terror for terror's sake. He wants to detach the United States from
the Middle East, leaving his radical Muslim faction and their sympathizers
to deal unmolested with the moderate ruling elites and the "Zionist
entity" of Israel. Bin Laden and his planners were inspired
by prior examples of United States retreat, most notably the defeat
in Vietnam, but more proximately the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia
in 1994 following the disastrous attempt to capture Somali warlord
Mohammed Farah Aidid, and the pullout from Lebanon after the bombing
of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1984. The impression had grown
that the U.S. was a paper tiger. American forces had a technological
edge and massive firepower, but if a foe could inflict a bloody
nose, the skittish American public would demand withdrawal, and
politicians would hold hearings to place blame. As Syrian Foreign
Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam said to American negotiators after
the Beirut bombings, "The United States is short of breath.
You can always wait them out."
The bombings
in Riyadh in 1995, at Khobar Towers in 1996, at the African embassies
in 1998, and of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, were all battles
in bin Laden's anti-American campaign, and all were victories. The
U.S. replies to these provocations were ineffectual, and in some
cases counterproductive. The Clinton administration apparently did
not understand how its weak responses would be perceived abroad.
A key American misstep was the failed 1998 attack on the al Qaeda
training camps in Afghanistan. By singling out bin Laden after the
embassy bombings and launching a "million to one shot"
cruise-missile barrage into the Afghan mountains, Clinton converted
bin Laden into a radical Muslim folk hero. A recent analysis in
the Egyptian opposition press observed, "What better proof
that Bin Laden had hurt the United States and satisfied the desire
of the Muslims than for Clinton himself to stand up and repeat the
name of Bin Laden three times as he announced the strikes against
Sudan and Afghanistan?... Had the United States not responded in
this way, Bin Laden might not have become such a legendary hero."
Note that in his August 20, 1998 address to the nation the President
referred to bin Laden and his network eight times, not three, and
called him "perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier
of international terrorism in the world today."
These successes
emboldened bin Laden, and doubtless encouraged him to plan and execute
the September 11 strikes. It would be disingenuous to dismiss the
tactical acumen al Qaeda displayed that day. Their attacks were
minutely planned, well executed, and achieved probably more than
hoped. (I still need to be convinced that they planned for
the World Trade Towers to collapse from support beams weakened by
fire.) But these tactical victories came at a price, and revealed
how poor a strategist bin Laden is. He engaged in a textbook case
of strategic overreach. He seemed to think that since a few small-scale
attacks on American assets had achieved some success, a large-scale
attack on the U.S. itself would achieve that much more. If the Americans
fled Somalia after 18 dead in Mogadishu, how much more would be
possible with thousands killed in New York? If destroying a Marine
barracks drove them from Lebanon, why not hit the Pentagon and push
them out of the whole region?
But bin Laden
made the same error the Japanese made in 1941 when they sought to
deliver a surprise-disabling blow. They believed that the United
States would negotiate rather than go to war after losing its Pacific
Fleet and the Philippines. It only stood to reason — why would
the Americans fight against such overwhelming odds? The American
military planners would not possess the forces necessary to respond
effectively, the isolationist public would clamor for peace, and
FDR would lack the mandate to press the issue. So the Japanese thought.
We know how that story ended.
Likewise with
bin Laden. He thought he could send the United States reeling by
an unprecedented act of violence. His attacks were daring, dramatic,
visually horrifying — and the "sleeping giant" awakened,
again "filled with a terrible resolve." The result was
not a "half-asset" response from a weary nation, but a
united country under strong leadership with a mandate to do whatever
it took to achieve victory. Our allies are in solidarity with us,
and our strategic competitors unwilling to get in the way. Bin Laden
may have been hoping for rulers in the Middle East to react with
their characteristic reluctance to cooperate with the United States
(they have, but not enough to forestall allied operations), or for
Pakistan to continue to support the Taliban, or even (fancifully)
for a mass uprising of Muslim peoples against the "Crusaders
and Jews." Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar called for 72
hours of rage in the Muslim world to protest the allied bombing
campaign, but the response since October 5 has been underwhelming.
All of these were strategic miscalculations. But the greatest was
underestimating the American national will.
The enemy has
now shifted its objectives. Their initial defensive strategy has
given way to a survival strategy. The Taliban has been hoping to
wear down the alliance, to make our leaders grow impatient, act
rashly and make a mistake, ideally involving ground troops. The
enemy cast the air war as a test of manhood which we were failing.
They taunted the allied forces, saying that the "real war"
would begin when the cowardly foe left their aircraft and came to
fight on the ground. Al Jazeera television showed an Arab mercenary
in Kandahar sneering at the allied attacks. "We say to you,
O Americans, if you are men as you say, and if you are the superpower
as you allege, then we are waiting for you," he said. "If
you are men, then come to the battlefield." The enemy hoped
to strike at American national will by inflicting unacceptably high
casualties on U.S. ground forces, and "drag bodies through
the streets." That may have worked in Somalia, when few Americans
— even in the leadership — understood why we were there.
But one doubts that the CNN effect would work in the enemy's favor
this time. The sight of an American serviceman being given a "Taliban
sleigh ride" through Kabul would probably have had substantially
the same domestic morale effect as the pictures of the Bataan Death
March.
But the allied
strategy of supporting the Northern Alliance has worked as intended.
Rather than risking large numbers of American lives, our leaders
patiently wore down the enemy from the air until the anti-Taliban
forces on the ground could begin to make gains. The recent advances
have been dramatic, and herald the end of the Taliban as a conventional
fighting force. They may take to the hills to fight a guerrilla
struggle, but, riven with defections and facing probable internecine
struggles, it is hard to see how the Taliban will resuscitate.
So now, two
months after the attack, what is bin Laden's next move on the terror
front? The best time to have made a second strike would have been
shortly after the allied air attack on the Taliban began. That would
have shown that bin Laden had the command, control and assets to
hit us at times and places of his choice. We are still waiting for
this signal. Al Qaeda issued a statement October 14 warning Muslims
in the U.S. and Britain "not to take airplanes and not to live
in towers and high buildings," and noting that "when Al-Qaeda
promises, it delivers." Terror cells are still operating in
the U.S. and Europe. The FBI has issued several warnings, and some
plots may have been foiled. "The storm of airplanes will not
be calmed," the threat went on, but recently the aerial tempest
has been directed only at al Qaeda.
That being
said, the war on terrorism is not over — far from it. Bin Laden
is not the only adversary and the civilized world is not free from
danger. Other enemies still plot, calculate, and look for opportunities
to strike. However, bin Laden's strategy has failed. He may still
have a few cruel tricks up his sleeve and many innocents in the
United States may yet die. But no attack, no physical damage, no
senseless fatalities caused by bin Laden will bring him any closer
to achieving his dream of an American-free Middle East.
Two months
after Pearl Harbor Japan was on the march and the United States
was in retreat. By contrast, bin Laden is now virtually in the "Hitler
bunker" stage of his war, hunkered down in an Afghan cave with
his three Eva's wondering how to sustain his kidney dialysis. Maybe
bin Laden now understands his own limitations as a planner, and
that, at the strategic level, the war he wanted to wage is over
and he has lost.
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