the introduction to the forthcoming Foreign Affairs book on the crisis is now available online. (The book itself will apparently be available in a couple of weeks.) Nothing shocking to those who have followed the situation closely, but perhaps worth a glance as an overview...
tb@yawn.com
publicaffairsbooks.com
Introduction
James F. Hoge, Jr., and Gideon Rose
With the Cold War over and the economy booming, the United States relaxed during the 1990s, letting go the tension it had sustained for decades. All that changed on September 11, 2001. Suddenly the world rushed in, striking brutally at symbols of the very wealth and power that had underwritten the public’s geopolitical nap. The nation awoke that morning to find itself at war. But it was a strange kind of war, one without front lines or massed troops, fought in the shadows against an elusive enemy, without a clear sense of where it would lead or how it would end. When the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were followed by a spate of letters bearing anthrax bacteria, shock and anger turned to panic. Citizens debated the merits of different gas masks, and politicians considered overriding pharmaceutical patents in order to produce massive quantities of antibiotic drugs that experts agreed were inappropriate for all but a few potential victims and would be necessary only for a vastly larger and more systematic attack.
Neither complacency nor hysteria, obviously, are good ways of approaching American national security. Measured determination is more appropriate, grounded in facts and sound judgments about the nature of the challenges facing the country and the alternative responses available. This book is designed to offer such facts and such judgments, to provide the basis for informed discussion of what has happened and where to go from here. The authors of the chapters are leading experts in their respective fields, and many of them issued warnings about lurking dangers or glaring vulnerabilities long before the current crisis. Now, belatedly, we know to listen.
The first question the book addresses is posed by its title: How did this happen? The short answer is because some very determined people wanted to make it happen and were able to outwit the defenses erected against them. Causation is a complex issue, however. Airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because hijackers had boarded them intent on committing an act of radical evil. Yet, much earlier, the terrorists themselves had become guided missiles, driven by the training and support they had received, by a perverse interpretation of one of the world’s great religions, and by a hatred for the United States and all that it stood for. They were able to carry out their mission, furthermore, only because they managed to evade the searching eyes of American intelligence agencies and slip through a porous domestic security system.
During the final years of the twentieth century, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide declined, but the number of casualties per attack rose. Experts felt the latter trend was ominous. They generally agreed that the risk of a catastrophic strike was still low, but worried that a new kind of terrorist driven by fanaticism and hatred rather than limited political objectives might try to cause true mass destruction. They were right to worry.
One man in particular epitomized the changing face of the threat. Osama bin Laden, son of a Saudi construction magnate and supporter of the Afghan mujahideen in their struggle against Soviet occupation, developed a vast terrorist network and organized a series of deadly attacks on U.S. installations around the world. He sought to oust Americans from the Middle East, overthrow so-called moderate Arab governments, and create a unified Muslim nation based on a puritanically oppressive theology.
Bin Laden saw the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the 1991 war against Iraq, and American support of Israel as just the latest episodes in a long history of Western humiliations of the Muslim world. Media coverage of Palestinians hurt or killed during clashes with Israelis, meanwhile, fanned the rage of his followers and of Arabs and Muslims more generally--many of whom found bin Laden’s radicalism appealing as a response to the poverty, frustration, and repression of their daily lives.
Bin Laden’s attacks have been planned carefully and financed through an extensive network of funding sources and secure economic pathways. The success of the most recent strike, however, also depended on the vulnerabilities of an open and ill-prepared society. Intelligence services cannot foil all terrorist plots, and developing appropriate benchmarks against which to judge those services' performance is difficult. Still, the September 11 attacks required extensive preparations in the United States and elsewhere, and fragments of information scattered here and abroad might have rung alarm bells had the dots been connected. Diminished human intelligence resources, a scarcity of regional experts, and poor coordination among information-gathering agencies helped keep the picture from being pieced together. In the execution of the operation itself, meanwhile, the terrorists boldly exploited the loopholes in the U.S. immigration and commercial aviation security systems, which were designed less to guarantee protection than to speed people and planes through as fast as possible.
Although they succeeded in bringing down the twin towers, the terrorists will not manage to provoke the "clash of civilizations" that their leader desires, nor will they spur drastic changes in the U.S. presence in the Middle East. But they have changed the world in other ways, etching the divide between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries far more sharply than the millennium celebrations ever did. Three challenges in particular now loom large: how to fight back against the people responsible, how to reduce our vulnerability to future attacks, and how to engage the world so as to lower the number of future attackers and those who might support them.
America is now at war. It accepts that the struggle will be lengthy, will involve casualties, and may have no neat or clear end. The initial targets are in Afghanistan, but Washington has vowed to pursue terrorists elsewhere as well. Disparate and uneasy states have been corralled into playing supporting roles in the coalition, but how many will stay on stage as the action proceeds remains to be seen. Some of the more tentative backers are states that have themselves been accused of supporting terrorists.
As the conflict has reshaped diplomatic relations, so has it disrupted the debate about the transformation of the U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of the post-Cold War world. That debate had pitted believers in new threats and new responses against the entrenched supporters of the status quo, and had taken place within what seemed to be a relatively narrow budgetary constraint. After September 11 the funds will be there, but the question of what to spend them on remains open. The Bush administration’s arguments about new and unconventional threats have been validated, but its early responses to those threats--notably an overemphasis on missile defense and an aversion to messy foreign interventions--have not.
Larger budgets remove some of the pressure to make choices between new force structures and expensive Cold War weapons systems. For the immediate future, there is money for both. Still, there will be debate about the kinds of adaptations that will be necessary if the war on terrorism becomes a central task of American foreign policy in the years ahead and if the armed forces are expected to help wage it. However the military is reconfigured, trying to prevent and respond to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will be among its top priorities.
At home, the open, secure life Americans took for granted is under stress. Fear is palpable--of bombings, hijackings, and biological or chemical attacks. Some curtailment of civil liberties is to be expected, along with the inconvenience of tightened security and the cost of making America safe in a shrunken world. The faltering economy now worries a public that had gotten used to lasting prosperity. Washington is offering confidence-building talk and fiscal-stimulus muscle, including a $15 billion bailout of the airlines. But the pressures of economic slowdown and enlarged public expenditures are canceling out yesterday’s budget surpluses. If no quick upturn emerges, deficits loom.
In the realm of homeland security, the hijackings have provoked a scramble to improve protection of airplanes, airports, nuclear power plants, and other vulnerable facilities. For their part, the anthrax incidents have prompted an urgent re-evaluation of the public health system’s readiness to counter future biological attacks. Other sectors cry out for similar attention. The exponential growth in transnational commerce has left American borders and ports underguarded and ill equipped to police increased flows of goods and people. Private aviation remains far less regulated than its commercial counterpart. Critical infrastructure in telecommunications and other areas remains vulnerable to mass disruption. None of these challenges is yet receiving the attention it deserves. Nor is it clear that the new director of the Office of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, will have the authority to effectively coordinate the efforts of disparate government bureaucracies and congressional committees.
The attacks of September 11, finally, have driven home the need for the cooperation and support of partners abroad in achieving crucial American goals. Recent opinion polls show a sharp increase in public support for engagement. At the government level, the Bush administration has moved swiftly to reduce frictions between the West and its former Cold War adversaries, Russia and China, in order to address new common threats. Globalized scourges such as terrorism, drugs, and organized crime cannot be effectively countered by one nation, no matter how powerful. The same can be said of transnational problems such as infectious diseases and global warming. Even nation-building is being dusted off as a requirement in some instances. President George W. Bush’s call for the United Nations to lead such an effort in Afghanistan once the military campaign is over stands in stark contrast to the abandonment of that country after the Soviet occupation was repulsed in the 1990s.
The time may have come, as well, for the United States to reconsider whether the close relations it maintains with repressive authoritarian regimes to assure regional stability in the short term truly serve its interests in the long term. In the Arab world in particular, populations that are experiencing explosive growth and high levels of unemployment are effectively being abandoned by inefficient, corrupt, and repressive regimes. Seeing little alternative, many answer the call of radical Islamist movements. For its own safety and stability, accordingly, the United States should consider pressing for the gradual opening of political and economic spaces to allow the people of this region to partake of the fruits of modernity and not just its toxins.
As we mourn the dead, we must also absorb the lessons, some of which are grim. Additional terrorist attacks on America are likely. Chemical and biological weapons may be used. September 11, an outrage and a tragedy for us, is an inspiration for terrorists. Only preparedness, determination, and, ultimately, self-confidence can offset the forebodings. The moral that Winston Churchill chose for his towering history of a previous global conflict is as apt now as it was then:
In War: Resolution.
In Defeat: Defiance.
In Victory: Magnanimity.
In Peace: Goodwill. |
