A Straddle?
As useful as President Clinton’s cruise-missile strikes.

October 10, 2001 6:30 p.m.

he Washington Post ran a disturbing sentence Wednesday, high up in its lead front-page story.

"The rebel Northern Alliance has appealed for airstrikes against Taliban forces arrayed in the north," according to the Post, "but senior Pentagon officials have been reluctant to promise direct air support, lest the United States be seen as backing a particular political element in Afghanistan."

The U.S. has so far been engaged in essentially quarry work in Afghanistan, making big rocks into smaller rocks. And this may well be necessary as a beginning to the campaign, but if the current bombing is not tethered to a meaningful political strategy it will ultimately be about as useful as President Clinton's cruise-missile strikes.

Such a political strategy depends on having an answer to the question of what we want a post-Taliban government to look like. Now, there may be good reason to be cagey about this in public to keep Pakistan on board. But simply not having an answer will risk plunging our whole effort — no matter how well intentioned, no matter how resolute — into incoherence.

It will prompt us to engage in a self-defeating game of cat-and-mouse like that of the Bay of Pigs — i.e., sort of supporting the Northern Alliance, but not really, doling out airstrikes in carefully measured spoonfuls to make sure our amount of support is just right.

This is what happened in post-Gulf War Iraq, when we wanted the Kurd and Shiite rebellions to succeed in toppling Saddam, but not to succeed so much that they would pull the country apart. So, we tried to fine-tune our support, and ended up letting Saddam crush the rebellions.

That attempted fine-tuning was partly driven by our unwillingness to get too involved in the messy job of shaping the future of a post-Saddam Iraq. An understandable impulse perhaps, but a mistake, and one that should not be repeated in the current war.

Bush can disavow nation-building all he wants, but we're in for a bout of it in Afghanistan. Bush has already symbolically acknowledged it with the airdrops of food and medicine, which suggests that we feel some responsibility for the well being of refugees in the area.

What would make this instance of nation-building different from our other recent experiences with it is that our national interest would be involved in a way it wasn't in Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans (you can argue about Bosnia and Kosovo, but it certainly made no sense for U.S. troops in particular to be doing the nation-building work there, when we — as is clear now — had bigger fish to fry).

None of this will be easy. Balancing the factions in Afghanistan, and doing so in a way that doesn't fatally taint any new government with American support, will require careful diplomatic and political work. It's the sort of thing we used to be good at in the days when the CIA would set up a government, say in Iran, that would be solid enough to last 30 years.

Those are skills we will have to discover again, or we will find ourselves with a result as disheartening and a policy as incoherent as those that attended the end of the Gulf War.