fin,
Joe, what should we do???
Should we attack Palestine? Should we attack Afghanistan all out??? Even though there is not even a solid majority in Afghanistan that supports the Taliban (even in Taliban controlled territory)??? I guess the central question is, "how far should we go?" What would suit you in this case? Is collateral damage acceptable? Is it okay to take out a few innocents so long as we nail those responsible????
Now you are talking reasonably. And reasonable people may have different ideas. But there are definitely 2 components - domestic and international, each of which is completely different.
Domestically, I think we need to watch who enters the country a hellofa lot more carefully than we did in the past. The same level of effort we expanded for counter-espionage against Eastern Block during the Cold War should be directed to the suspicious groups.
Internationally, I think Bilow on AMD thread makes a lot of sense (if you read his posts from last 3 to 4 days). I think we need to achieve some victory (Bilow argues for total victory), that will not escape anyone in the world reading the news. This is just to take the wind out of sails of the terrorists. The victory should be something that is achievable with excellent probability of success, which will at the same time greatly diminish the capacity of the terrorist networks to raise funds, recruit soldiers, communicate, organize.
Since bin Laden in in Afganistan, obviously, it will involve operations inside Afganistan. The first thing we should do is if Taliban government refuses to turn over bin Laden, Congress should officially declare war on Afganistan, just to make the sweat for a while. We should close the air space over Afganistan.
My idea would be to secure a staging area on the border of Afganistan for ground troops, hopefully Pakistan, since it has the best strategic location. I would start building up the force with idea of full scale ground force invasion. In the meantime, I would set aside some money to bribe the locals to obtain intelligence information. The goal should be to wipe out the entire bin-Laden network. The people who are under him directly, and all the foreigners who come to Afganistan to do their jihad - most of them go through bin Laden "organization" and have loyalty to him.
I said this should be a goal, and I am not sure how achievable it would be with air force, and air drops of special forces. It may be a little too risky for the risk averse America, since some soldiers may be captured and held hostage. But it would be clean, in that there would not be too many civilian dead, since bin Laden is apparently in mountains, not in cities.
Anyway, why we are gathering intelligence, deploying special forces, the pictures on the tube should be military transport planes landing, and unloading tons of equipment. If in the course of the deployment it is determined that the special forces / air force can't achieve the objective, or the rist is too high, we would the force ready for ground force invasion.
By the time we are ready with ground force invasion - 2 to 3 months, Taliban would be sitting there, losing morale, facing defections every day, while they are preparing to resist the US invasion from the South, the Northern Alliance (supplied and supported by the US) would start offensive from North. By the time the invasion happens, the paper tiger of Taliban would fold, which would leave us with hunting down the remnants of Taliban and bin Ladens fighters hiding in the mountains. Hunting them all down may be time consuming, but there would be co civilian casualties, the borders are closed, supply flow is shut down, and US could just wait it out, hunt them one by one with help of sattellites and surveillence planes. In the meantime, we could organize free elections, send some aid. It would be a total victory, with bin Laden and his group eliminated, Taliban defeated, with country of Afganistan leaving the millitant Islamic camp, and joining the moderate camp.
Maybe the victory would be as symbolic as Russian defeat there, which more or less started the disintegration of Soviet Empire. It could do the same thing to budding "empire" of militant Islamic states, who are the sponsors of the terror. The leaders of the other countries sponsoring terrorsim would be on notice that the same thing will happen to them as what happened to Taliban.
By the way, I would not do anything with any other sponsor of terrorism for the time being, until the Taliban chapter is closed.
I think one of the danger is a partial victory, like Taliban turning over bin Laden (a single person), or if the US takes out bin Laden, while leaving Taliban in power. I have a feeling that once this minor victory is achieved, some of our allies would say "that's it, we are out of here", and it would be just the US vs. "Islam", which is not the best position to be in.
Another danger is going through the UN, as Bush Sr. learned (as did Clinton, who pursued invasion of Yugoslavia through NATO instead).
Joe
PS: Why did you ask about attacking Palestine? Were you joking? What would be the objective? |
