[The Guardian] Powell loses power over Pentagon The military success in Afghanistan has shifted control of US foreign policy back to the hawks, writes Julian Borger Tuesday December 11, 2001
It is not over yet, of course. The hunt for al-Qaida in the Afghan highlands is a difficult, dirty and highly dangerous task for the soldiers involved, but the successes of the campaign so far have already imparted their momentum on the groundwork for action elsewhere.
In Afghanistan, as in Kosovo, overwhelming air power appears once again to have been decisive, and the sense of opportunity is tangible among the administration's hawks.
This is the moment, they are arguing, to flush out other rogue threats to US national security, in Iraq, and an ever-lengthening list of weak and failed states thought to harbour terrorists - Somalia, Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia and so on.
Barring a disaster in the Afghan endgame, the campaign will serve to bury yet deeper American fears of Vietnam-like quagmires. The extraordinary capability of US technology demonstrated in Desert Storm, Kosovo and now Afghanistan has unshackled a new military self-confidence, held in check for more than a decade by the constraints of the risk-averse Powell doctrine.
That stipulated that the US should either go to war with all its might, planes, missiles and armoured divisions - or not at all. The new lessons suggest instead that wars can be won with only a few hundred soldiers equipped with state-of-the-art equipment.
The decline of the old doctrine is also a blow to its author, Colin Powell, the secretary of state. His influence and his advocacy of multilateral solutions to US foreign policy challenges had appeared to be on the wane even before September 11, and he was emerging as a lone voice in an instinctively unilateralist administration.
After the terrorist attacks, however, he seemed suddenly to be the indispensable man, as Washington scrambled to build coalitions to support its war on terrorism.
Now the wheel has turned full circle. The Pentagon triumphed with only a few body bags. Grave warnings from the state department that the war would trigger uprisings across the Islamic world have been proved groundless. The bombing of Afghanistan even continued through Ramadan without much controversy.
America's sense of interdependence with the rest of the world, which seemed so profound on September 12, is now an uncomfortable memory in the Bush administration.
As the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, pointedly told a gathering of defence policy wonks in Washington: "The mission determines the coalition. The coalition must not determine the mission."
To provide just one symptom of the new mood, after hinting at the height of the terrorism crisis that the US might be interested after all in giving some teeth to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, US negotiators last week torpedoed any chance of an agreement on the issue.
The chief negotiator at the talks, John Bolton, is an undersecretary of state forced on to the state department by the White House over the protests of his nominal boss, Powell. He is the Pentagon's man in state. Powell does not have a counterweight in the defence department.
The policy competition between the state department and the Pentagon is in some ways a structural phenomenon in all administrations, but Powell's rivalry with Rumsfeld and his ideologue deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, stands out for its depth and visibility.
John Pike, a strategic analyst at the online intelligence newsletter, GlobalSecurity.com, believes "there's never been this sort of extreme polarisation that will play out over the next couple of months."
President Bush has encouraged the fierce debate, listening to both sides before making decisions. By all accounts the role of the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, is more to crystallise the issues than to add the casting vote. That is more likely to come from the vice-president, Dick Cheney, or Bush himself.
Nevertheless, it is significant that in Rice's national security council, there are more voices echoing the Pentagon than empathising with the diplomats at state department. The scales are likely to be tilted even further to the hawks after the departure this month of Bruce Reidel, a Clinton holdover, who has a great deal of knowledge of, and sensitivity towards, the Arab world.
The hawks' candidate to replace him is Zalmay Khalizad, an Afghan-American currently involved in the effort to build a post-Taliban Afghan government.
If Khalizad is given the Middle East brief, and it appears the fight for the job is still very much on, it will mark a substantial gain for the Pentagon line on the Middle East. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz did not want the US special envoys, General Anthony Zinni and William Burns, to be sent to the region - a decision taken by state and supported by Reidel and consequently Rice.
Washington, the Pentagon argued, should not try to exert pressure on Israel, a key ally at a critical moment. Bending over backwards to accommodate Arab opinion would in the long term only undermine the anti-terrorist campaign.
In the short term, at least, the upsurge in Israeli-Palestinian violence has won the argument for them, critically undermining the Zinni-Burns mission at its outset. The White House consequently dropped the traditional appeal to both sides to exercise caution, the blame was focused on Arafat, and nothing said by Washington about the heavy Israeli retaliation.
Most significantly of all was the very fact that the Pentagon had a central place at the table in the discussion of Middle East policy, which has traditionally been the preserve of the state department and the national security council.
So, while the state-defence, Powell-Rumsfeld, debate continues to push forwards, backwards and sideways with the flow of events as it always has, the weekly shifts in policy mask broader strategic gains by the Pentagon, which is now the dominant department by far.
That could have important consequences for Middle East policy, the future of Afghanistan and, of course, the fate of Iraq.
Email julian.borger at guardian.co.uk