Hard Targets
Defining success in a war on terrorism.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
September 19, 2001 5:30 p.m.

chief challenge of waging war on terrorism is that the enemy is so poorly defined. Just as the "war on poverty" is doomed to fail because the poor will always be with us, a war on anti-American terrorism also threatens never to end because America-haters will live in the world as long as there is an America. And terrorism is simply a name for some of the methods by which they strike against us.

Which isn't to say the war is not worth fighting. It does, however, create a problem: how to define success. Osama bin Laden in a body bag is surely one measure. If President Bush fails to nab him dead or alive, bin Laden becomes a one-man Iranian hostage crisis for his administration. It is probably not an overstatement to say that getting bin Laden is now a necessary if not sufficient condition for Bush's re-election.

Imagine the consequences were bin Laden to be killed without anyone's being able to produce a body. Just as Hitler's corpse apparently never was found in his Berlin bunker, bin Laden could die beneath the rubble of some unmapped cave hit by a cruise missile. If his death remains unconfirmed, he becomes the Elvis Presley of terrorism.

For this and other reasons, President Bush will want to outline concrete goals by which the war against terrorism can be judged. Those goals must go beyond taking out bin Laden or even his network. The ambitious goal undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz has announced — "ending" the states that foster terrorism — has the advantage of being clear-cut; we'll know if the governments of Iraq and Iran are toppled. But if the administration adopts this long-term goal, it will also need incremental achievements that demonstrate the progress of the war.

Partly this is because it will be a long time before Wolfowitz's goal is achieved; partly it's because of the nature of that goal. Ending terrorist states is obviously not something one achieves all at once. Diplomatic realities will also force us to adopt incremental goals: Some countries will support some aspects of our objective but not others. It will therefore be necessary to build different coalitions for each step we take. (The coalition for taking out bin Laden, for example, will be broader than that for taking out the Ba'athist regime in Iraq.)

Both defensive and offensive achievements will help keep morale up. The counterintelligence services may want to announce foiled plots with more fanfare than they have in the past. And just as drug warriors like to show off warehouses full of narcotics as evidence of their accomplishments, the FBI may want to call attention to the terrorist cells it has busted up or the suspects it has arrested at the border.

Many recent U.S. military actions have suffered from an impoverished definition of success: in Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, etc. By its very nature, a war on terrorism will evade V-day celebrations. Bush will have to create an environment in which he can point to concrete steps he has taken to keep anything like what happened on September 11 from ever happening again.

Worth Reading
The National Post editorializes about "the equivocators." . . . And Stephen Bates writes about a book on the history of the Soviet Union — and of terrorism — that can't be published in Britain or America.