Mixed Signals
On the bombing campaign.

October 23, 2001 2:45 p.m.

hat's the sense of sending $2 million missiles to hit a $10 tent that's empty?" President Bush asked in the days after September 11.

An excellent question.

Maybe the tents have been spared, but American bombs and missiles have been hitting a lot of empty warehouses and concrete bunkers in Afghanistan. Assuming the real-estate market is still depressed there and warehouse space isn't particularly valuable, this is not a very cost-conscious way to wage war, let alone a way to win one.

It had seemed in recent days that the administration had finally faced up to the fact that this war — despite all the complicated political questions involved — requires destroying the Taliban, which in turn means hitting their front-line troops.

But in the Washington Post this morning, Thomas Ricks reports that the administration has decided to bomb the front-line troops only very gingerly. That "straddle" I wrote about two weeks ago appears to live on: the Bushies can't decide whether to temporarily throw in with the Northern Alliance or not.

And so, the administration appears to be calibrating its bombing campaign with an excruciating preciousness.

At this point, the administration's attitude should clearly be: "We'd like to have a political solution in place for post-Taliban Afghanistan. We probably should have thought about it sooner and harder. But we're just not going to be able to figure it out in the midst of a war. Bombs away."

The most disturbing bit in the Ricks story is a statement from Air Force General Richard B. Myers, who explains that "This is a different kind of conflict. The closest analogy would be the drug war."

This is not very comforting. Put aside the fact that the drug war can't be won. The truly disturbing thing is that much of the drug war depends on hokum, including the notion that certain policies are important, not on their merits, but in the way that they send "signals" to potential users of drugs.

The U.S. has been engaged in just such signal-sending in Afghanistan. The public justification — let's hope it's just a ruse — for last weekend's special-operations raid is that the demonstration of our ability to insert ourselves into southern Afghanistan will signal potential Pashtun rebels that we can get them supplies should they need them.

The idea that some budding southern warlord is going to make his decision about whether to revolt on the basis of this signal — on the basis of a raid that apparently killed no one and lasted just a few hours — seems absurd. The only thing that will prompt mass defections and betrayals in Afghanistan will be the destruction of the Taliban.

It's well past time to get on with it in earnest.

Wars usually take on a logic of their own, and sooner or later the administration will have to bow to the logic of this one. Not only will the bombing have to intensify, but if seizing control of Mazar-e Sharif is as important as it is portrayed, and the Northern Alliance can't manage it, the possibility of U.S. ground troops themselves taking on such a discrete mission will deserve consideration.

The only signal that will ultimately resonate in Afghanistan is the one that is sent with dead Taliban.