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 olin
Powell has come out for an accelerated campaign against the Taliban.
He's on the right track, for a practical diplomatic reason, but
for a much deeper one as well.
The diplomatic
consideration is simply that if the Pakistani government is experiencing
domestic unrest because of our bombing campaign, the last thing
we want to do is extend our bombing campaign.
This is why
it was probably a mistake in the first place to try to placate the
Pakistani government by leaving Taliban front-line troops intact
to block Northern Alliance troops from sweeping into Kabul.
This too-cute
tactic served only to drag out the very bombing that Pakistan finds
objectionable, by delaying its ultimate and inevitable political
objective: toppling the Taliban.
Yes, it's important
for the U.S., one way or another, to help forge a post-Taliban government,
and the fact that the administration hadn't thought hard about this
before beginning the bombing campaign was a mistake (a particularly
conservative mistake, as I argued in the New
York Post
yesterday).
But now that
the bombing has been underway for three weeks, we should just be
focusing on ousting the Taliban and worry about picking up the political
pieces later. The deeper lesson here is that delay and half-measures
are usually a mistake in military campaigns, and in geopolitics
generally.
Half-measures
often serve only to inflame an enemy, without achieving the benefit
of the objective sought in the first place. In the case of Afghanistan,
for instance, bombing the Taliban halfheartedly apparently outraged
Pakistani public opinion without really furthering our objective
of destroying the Taliban.
The bombing
campaign in Afghanistan was like removing a Band-Aid, really slowly.
But perhaps the foremost example of the folly of half-measures in
the Middle East is our Iraq policy.
One of Osama
bin Laden's grievances is the U.S.-supported sanctions against Iraq.
The purpose of the sanctions is to oust Saddam Hussein, but since
it is a singularly ineffective way to do that it serves only to
create a complaint against the U.S. while leaving Saddam in power:
the worst of both worlds.
Indeed, if
we're looking for hints from bin Laden about how U.S. policy should
be changed in the Mideast — as apparently some critics of Israel
are — then maybe we should take the step that would make it
possible to remove the sanctions immediately and forever: a direct
assault on Saddam that destroys his regime.
Delaying, and
skirting around the real issue — Saddam's continued existence
in power — is a formula for political and diplomatic problems
without the ultimate upside of a Saddam-less Iraq.
Colin Powell
now apparently understands this logic in the case of Afghanistan.
Let's hope he gets it soon when it comes to Iraq.
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