[iwar] [fc:"Mission.Creep.and.We.Haven't.Even.Started"]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-27 15:37:55
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 15:37:55 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:"Mission.Creep.and.We.Haven't.Even.Started"]
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"Mission Creep and We Haven't Even Started"
Commentary by Simon Jenkins ,The Times [London], 26 Sep 01.

One thing is for certain.  Democracy is under threat.  The Prime
Minister says we are going to war and our soldiers may be killed, but he
does not say what war or against whom.  We are to "prepare for" a
chemical attack, but nobody says how.  Parliament is still not back from
holiday.  Those rude festivals of democracy, party conferences, are
suborned.  Channel 4 runs Second World War footage of gasmasks.  A
tinpot Home Office tyrant hauls out an old file marked "Identity Cards"
and eagerly thrusts it before ministers. 

What on Earth is going on? I am no pacifist.  I supported the Falklands
and Gulf wars, both of them projected against blatant acts of
territorial aggression.  But the entire military might of the West is
now to be hurled across the mountains of Afghanistan in pursuit of one
man. 

Carriers are dispatched, missiles are primed, reservists are called up
in Midwest states, for a manhunt in the Hindu Kush.  Vast economic
distress is being created worldwide.  The 21st century is off to fight
the 19th.  The goal is to "stamp out terrorism", but nobody believes a
war can do that. 

T.  E.  Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an epic tale of Western
engagement in Arabia, one of the most dramatic and romantic tales of men
in conflict.  Its message for the present is clear: always fight Arabs
with Arabs and always keep your word.  Reading the book this weekend, I
wondered if anyone in charge was reading it.  Have British ministers or
commandos even heard of Lawrence? Do they think he was merely a star in
a camel movie?

The Bush Administration has respected Lawrence's warning up to a point. 
It did not do what Bill Clinton would have done after the World Trade
Centre attack.  Hawks in the Pentagon (and in the British press) wanted
Clinton-style punitive bombing raids on Kabul and Baghdad.  George W. 
Bush refused.  There could be no faster way of exhausting sympathy and
support in the region, no surer way of endangering any mission to
extract Usama Bin Ladin from his hide.  Mr Bush's team of Gulf War
veterans - the same as wisely counselled against seizing Baghdad in 1991
- remains a talisman of sanity in this bizarre affair. 

The declared objective is still to find, arrest and bring to trial the
man thought to be responsible for the New York and Washington
atrocities. 

The objective is just.  The crime was never "an assault on democracy". 
If Western democracy cannot withstand a suicide bomb attack on an office
block, it is pathetic indeed.  The crime was directed not against
democracy but against Western policies in the Middle East.  To
misdescribe it is to inflate and thus appease the terrorist.  But the
culprit must be found.  The question is how, and are there means
proportionate to ends?

It has taken 12 years to bring to justice the bombers of the Lockerbie
jet.  Years of ineffective bombast had to be succeeded by years of
diplomacy.  Given the scale of this month's outrage and the rumoured
threats of more, Western governments have taken the view that they
cannot wait.  (In which case why did they do so little after the 1993
World Trade Centre bomb, and only yesterday tackle "terrorist" bank
accounts?)

We are told that two weeks ago Washington pondered a number of options. 
Middle East hands advised counter-terrorist measures in Europe and
America, but a waiting-game against Bin Ladin in Afghanistan.  With a
price on his head and his protectors embroiled in civil war, the man
would sooner or later be winkled out of his mountains.  He could hide,
but he could not run from a crime of this magnitude.  With every country
out for his blood, with his lines of communication cut, his gang pursued
and his finances dead, his life would be as cheap as that of his
murdered rival, Shah Masood. 

On this argument, the monkey was best caught softly.  The Taliban regime
was already in contact with the United States.  It had stopped last
year's heroin crop in response to pressure and was increasingly nervous
of harbouring a man already wanted for terrorism.  Afghanistan's
anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, backed by Russian and Western aid, was
turning up the heat.  With Bin Ladin's apparent guilt condemned
throughout the Middle East, an isolated Taliban could well find it
convenient, in time, to send him on his way.  The advice was to turn
every screw, but avoid frontal assault.  Do not risk blowback. 

Like the request to bomb Kabul and Baghdad, this counsel was rejected. 
The White House had already pressed the "massive retaliation" button,
even it had not signalled the assault.  There was total impatience with
any theory of "regional dynamic".  The world, or at least America,
wanted bombs to fall.  If the world would not cooperate, it would have
to comply.  This man was wanted "dead or alive".  The best hope was that
the widely hated Taliban might prove a politically easy target.  If Arab
sympathy were a bluff, that bluff would have to be called. 

Since then anyone with the slightest knowledge of Afghanistan has asked
what the huge armada of ships, planes, tanks and infantry now racing
towards the Indian Ocean is meant to achieve.  The answer changes as
expectation rises.  Toppling the Taliban is the new objective.  The
mission has crept before it has begun.  Such are the difficulties of
finding the fugitive that a protracted war may have to be fought and an
entire country conquered first.  Only by occupying Kabul can America be
sure of flushing out Bin Ladin. 

As Lawrence found in Arabia, the shift from winning a battle to winning
a war requires an edifice of promises, bribes and assurances to local
allies.  NATO is now wedded to the drug-dealers and warlords of the KLA
in Kosovo. 

So the United States must soon be wedded to the Northern Alliance in
Afghanistan.  It is wedded also to a Pakistan Government whose
destabilisation by the Taliban during an Afghan-American war would be a
catastrophe.  Pakistan is a nuclear state.  To risk creating the world's
first fundamentalist nuclear state is a price that even America should
balk at paying for Bin Ladin. 

After such a war, such a commitment, what next? America cannot cut and
run.  This is precisely the trap into which the Russians walked 15 years
ago.  It is the trap into which General Colin Powell and the first
President Bush studiously refused to walk in Iraq in 1991.  Then the
Americans decided that they were not in the business of toppling Middle
East governments, only restoring borders.  Now there is talk of not
repeating that "mistake", of finding a new regime in Kabul that is
favourable to the West and which America can be proud to defend.  I am
sure the Russians can suggest one, with a smile across the face of the
Kremlin. 

The 1916-18 Arabian campaign was against Turkey.  It was fought by the
British using Arab irregulars, exploiting their shifting loyalties to
lethal effect.  Western tactics and equipment had proved as
inappropriate in the desert as they later proved in the forests of
Vietnam.  The Turks were beaten not by tanks and planes but by camels
and ambushes.  The Russians in Afghanistan were beaten by donkeys. 

Getting Arabs to arrest Bin Ladin, somehow, some day, was always the
best response to the American atrocities.  If that could not be
achieved, then a daring in-and-out raid would have to do.  But to cover
such a raid by in effect declaring war on an Arab state and toppling its
government can only suck the West into a trap.  It risks the wealth of
sympathy that America has garnered this past fortnight and could yet
destroy the remarkable world coalition to which Tony Blair yesterday
drew attention and for which he can take considerable credit. 

The Taliban is far more of a menace to the Afghan people than to the
West, a menace that was the direct outcome of a former foreign
intervention - by the Russians.  But it is for Afghans to dispose of
that menace. 

Romantic Westerners may long to imitate Lawrence, who "drew these tides
of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars".  But
Lawrence's will was not enough.  He won a campaign but lost his honour
and the West's good name.  He was double-crossed by the greed of oil
companies and the hamfistedness of statesmen.  Look now at his
inheritance. 

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