[iwar] [fc:Striking-Back:-Harsh-New-Tactics?]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-13 13:14:01
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 13:14:01 -0700 (PDT)
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International Herald Tribune
September 13, 2001
News Analysis 
Striking Back: Harsh New Tactics? 
By Joseph Fitchett, International Herald Tribune 
PARIS - Retaliating effectively for the terrorist strike that humbled
American power will take years and require the United States to use
overwhelming force - perhaps including political assassination - in ways
shunned by Washington in recent decades, Western officials and experts said
Wednesday.
To restore U.S. credibility, they said, the Bush administration may well
need to commit American armed forces to ground attacks to capture or kill
terrorist leaders and overthrow regimes that help or harbor them.
"Washington has to be ready ultimately to send in forces - probably airborne
- to seize and temporarily hold the capital of a hostile regime or the
center of power of an organization, sustaining the inevitable percentage of
U.S. casualties," according to Francois Heisbourg, a leading defense expert
in France.
For the Pentagon and Congress, such tactics contradict the thrust of U.S.
military thinking favoring a doctrine of "zero loss" that has avoided
committing ground troops and relied heavily on air power and long-distance
precision weapons.
But it also limited Washington to a counterterrorist approach that relied on
missile retaliation - often derided as a "pin-prick approach" - and
preventive intelligence, which apparently failed totally this time.
In what appears to be a new era for U.S. actions against terrorism, the
sources outlined a menu of options for the Bush administration to disrupt
terrorist organizations.
This included:
*Re-authorization of political assassination as an option for U.S. policy,
including the deliberate targeting of individual adversaries with missile
strikes.
*Open U.S. support for foreign surrogate forces to make war on regimes
backing international terrorism.
*Punitive expeditions by U.S. troops, including perhaps airborne forces or
landings by the Marines, to seize capitals or other sensitive territory long
enough to overthrow terrorist regimes.
*A new international coalition of Western governments and Russia against the
terrorist offensive.
Mr. Heisbourg suggested that Washington seek an emergency summit meeting of
leaders of the G-8, the club of leading industrial nations and Russia. 'This
is a defining moment for this is the time when Washington should call on its
allies for all-out support and expect to get it," he said.
"Since yesterday, we are in a new era, a pivotal moment in which the United
States and its allies are going to define themselves and their relationship
for the coming decades," a French official said.
Washington needs to meet the challenge to U.S. credibility and leadership,
he said, and should be able to expect full cooperation from its allies - and
probably Russia. "Now we have to worry less about Chechnya because peacetime
standards are not going to stand and you are going to do things you wouldn't
normally do," the official said.
"I hope this is going to make us serious enough to go beyond just looking
for the specific perpetrators and take on the governments and other backers
who provide suicide bombers, funding, technological capabilities,
intelligence - all the different groups and functions enabling terrorist
organizations to operate like multinationals," according to Richard Perle, a
Bush administration adviser who is influential on anti-terrorist policy.
If the U.S. adopts an stance along these lines, the obvious assassination
targets include Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born terrorist mastermind, and
Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader who has vowed to expend his country's total
efforts to damage the United States.
"Don't worry about making a martyr out of either man now that the terrorists
have had such an inspirational success for recruits to an ongoing,
escalating holy war against the United States," a U.S. intelligence source
said.
The orchestrated onslaught Tuesday seemed to crown a series of operations by
the bin Laden network that included an earlier attack on the World Trade
Center, the bombing of U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia and attacks on a U.S.
warship in Aden.
An immediate option against Mr. bin Laden, sources said, would be for the
United States to throw open military support in Afghanistan behind the
rebels resisting the Taleban regime in Kabul.
"We need to send a signal to the Taleban and the rest of the world that they
are going to lose power," according to Reuel Gerecht, a former intelligence
specialist on Islamic terrorism.
U.S. readiness to engage in all-out military actions - including punitive
expeditions involving heavy loss of life and destruction in target cities,
the near-certainty of at least minimal American casualties and with a new
U.S. readiness to disregard inhibitions on using U.S. military strength - is
in the cards now for Washington, according to these sources, who include
European officials.
"Pearl Harbor cost 2,304 American lives, so this even deadlier attack means
that Washington has to do the kind of things that the United States did in
World War II that ultimately took them to Tokyo," the French official said.
Hitting back at terrorist installations with cruise missiles, a reprisal
tactic favored by the Clinton administration, has little place in U.S.
policy in the wake of the devastating losses sustained this week, the
sources said.
Even efforts to get more and better U.S. counterintelligence will be
secondary and perhaps misguided, according to Mr. Gerecht, who said that
"this challenge cannot be crushed by actions carried out behind a veil."
The core of President George W. Bush's declaration of U.S. intentions in the
new, shadowy war against terrorism came in a phrase in his address Tuesday
night on television: the United States, he said, would make "no distinction
between the terrorists who committed the attacks and those who harbor them."
This approach will require time and a deliberate signal from Washington that
it is gearing up for a major war, not just tactical retaliation.
The United States used force to change the regime in Panama in 1990, when
U.S. troops waged a two-week campaign to reach the capital, capture
President Manuel Noriega and replace him.
But Washington turned wary of committing U.S. ground forces after Somali
guerrillas mauled American special forces in an ambush in Mogadishu in a
one-day battle in October 1993.
Logistically and politically, the Middle East would be even more
inaccessible and probably more hostile as an environment for U.S. ground
troops waging punitive expeditions or trying to seize capitals to eliminate
terrorist leaders.
To reach Afghanistan, for example, the United States would have to rely
mainly on paratroopers to even seize a guerrilla base and then might face
great difficulties in resupplying and sustaining a ground force.
Neighboring Pakistan, nominally friendly to the United States, has close
political and ideological links with the Taleban and would not cooperate
with a U.S. action against Kabul.
Washington will have to use power in ways that it hesitated to adopt in the
era of moral competition during the cold war. Currently, government
agencies, including the military, are barred from deliberately trying to
physically eliminate foreign leaders.
Assassination - either covertly or by missile attacks deliberately aimed at
terrorists or national leaders backing them - is currently banned for U.S.
government agencies.
But the prohibition is contained in a presidential directive, not a law or
congressional statute. By signing a new order, Mr. Bush could bring back
this option, currently used openly by Israel against Palestinian leaders.
Terrorist leaders can also be exposed to physical elimination if the United
States resorts to using more destructive weapons against their headquarters
whenever they can be located.
"To be effective in killing people, you need cluster bombs, even napalm, not
cruise missiles" of the sort designed for pinpoint accuracy and minimal
casualties among nearby civilians, according to Mr. Gerecht.
Before deploying U.S. strike forces, Washington can use surrogate forces -
giving stronger backing to the Iraqi opposition, for example, or helping the
coalition in Afghanistan, known as the northern alliance, which is fighting
the Taleban, Mr. Bin Laden's protectors.
For months now, the alliance has been reported to be getting a trickle of
covert assistance from the CIA, mainly in the form of communications
equipment and expertise from U.S. specialists who try at the same time to
eavesdrop on the phone conversations of the bin Laden group.
The anti-Taleban forces sustained a major loss last Sunday when their
charismatic leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was killed or at least badly injured
by a suicide bomber. Even without his leadership, specialists said, the
alliance coalition could quickly threaten Kabul and other key Taleban
strongholds if it received advanced weapons from Washington.
Similar theories surfaced about stepped-up U.S. military action against the
Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. If an Iraqi role in terrorism surfaced now,
Mr. Heisbourg said, "you might have to end up with U.S. Marines in Kabul or
Baghdad or some other capital for a limited occupation."
Coalition warfare against terrorism is an overriding threat. British, French
and other European leaders seemed to foreshadow strong allied support for a
new, bare-knuckled U.S. war on terrorism.

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