Stratfor comments:
Sept. 11, 2001, will go down as one of those rare days when everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. It is also a day that will change American behavior in fundamental ways.
Most of these changes we cannot yet begin to fathom. How does the air transport security system function in the wake of Sept. 11? How do the scars of the World Trade Center wreckage affect the psyche of Americans? How does the sense of vulnerability now in place translate into policy? That there will be consequences in these and other areas cannot be doubted, but it is impossible to see the outcomes clearly yet.
Other consequences, however, are more obvious and inescapable. We know someone planned and executed this attack and did so superbly. We know the United States will respond and will respond violently. But the central fact is that we actually do not know who attacked the United States today. The logical suspect is, of course, Osama bin Laden. He is certainly most commonly mentioned. It may well have been him. But there are problems with that assumption -- or with ascribing it only to bin Laden.
Bin Laden has been followed by U.S. intelligence for years. He has been under the highest scrutiny, with all necessary resources devoted to him. His movements have been tracked, his conversations monitored, his visitors noted. Or, even if this is not the case, bin Laden has had to assume -- along with everyone around him -- that this is the case. Therefore, the assumption would be made by any sensible operative that any operation in which bin Laden was complicit would be compromised.
There are, therefore, two possibilities. The first is that bin Laden directly authorized and planned the operation -- heedless of the risks involved -- and that U.S. intelligence committed an egregious act of omission by allowing the operation to go forward or, worse, by not knowing it was planned. The second possibility is that the operation was the act of someone other than bin Laden.
This does not mean that he was not indirectly involved in some ways. From all reports, bin Laden -- having studied the way in which Israelis decapitated and penetrated Palestinian movements in the 1970s and 1980s -- created a different sort of organization. It is one united in doctrine but with a diffused command and control capability. That means that groups could split off from the main organization and operate independently, without coordinating with the main group. It is our best guess at this moment that one of these groups, having split off quite a while ago and gone to ground, re-emerged and carried out the mission -- without any recourse to bin Laden himself.
This creates a strategic dilemma for the United States. In the past, U.S. policy on terrorism was to strike against the perpetrators. In this case it is not clear who the perpetrators are. In one sense, it could be said to be bin Laden. In another sense, bin Laden may not have had any knowledge that this was taking place. This would explain why U.S. intelligence had no early warning.
Clearly, the old U.S. formula -- which requires guilt and punishment -- does not work. It is impossible to identify the perpetrators. It is not impossible, however, to identify the locus of perpetration, if you will. Bin Laden may or may not have known, but he set in motion the process that ended in the worst one-day disaster the United States has known since the Civil War. As at Pearl Harbor, the issue was not which pilot or carrier attacked, but that the corporate entity of Japan bore collective responsibility.
Thus far the United States, following U.S. legal principle, has not been prepared to assign corporate responsibility where no formal corporate entity existed. That is what will change now. The United States will now, in effect, impose a corporate identity and strike against it. In all likelihood, that corporate identity will include the nation of Afghanistan, which houses bin Laden, but it will not be confined to it.
The normal U.S. response will be a low-cost air attack. This will be insufficient, if necessary. The real response will be to launch a covert war of annihilation against bin Laden and his allies. The model will be similar to the Battle of Europe, which followed the 1972 Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes. In that scenario, Israeli intelligence waged a systematic war of annihilation against a combination of Palestinian organizations.
The likely response of the United States will be to abandon the law prohibiting assassination by U.S. intelligence agencies, freeing U.S. special forces and intelligence services to hunt and kill -- and to be hunted and killed themselves. In this war, the combination of U.S. technical intelligence with U.S. Special Forces will provide a unique capability. The weakness will be human intelligence, something the United States has neglected.
One inevitable outcome of all of this will be a much closer strategic alignment between the United States and Israel, precisely because of Israel's superior human intelligence capabilities. We can therefore expect a high-low response of extremely sophisticated intelligence systems managing both advanced precision munitions and special operations.
One thing must be understood clearly. This is not a war that will end quickly, nor is it a war in which there will not be counterattacks. The opening salvo was just that -- an opening salvo. It will be followed by other attacks against both forces operating in the field and targets in the United States and abroad. Like Pearl Harbor, this is the beginning -- not the end.
George Friedman is the founder and chairman of STRATFOR |
