Look: Daniel Davies put it well in his summary description of the American way of war at the start of the twenty-first century:
>1. Set out with a cause (usually but not necessarily an unambiguously good
>cause like protect the Kosovans, stop the massacres, destroy terrorism)
>but no specific war aims.
>2. If possible, bomb, bomb and bomb again. Cause massive destruction with
>no risk to American troops. Take as much care as possible to minimise
>civilian casualties. If bombing is logistically impractical, put together
>a UN force and wander around waving guns nervously.
>3. Repeat step 2 until a high-profile success or rout of some opposing
>force is achieved. Declare this to be a victory.
>4. Get the hell out, leaving the situation in the theatre of war sometimes
>slightly better, but usually much worse, than it was at the outset.
The only thing I would disagree with is (4): that on balance it seems to me that the situations in Bosnia, in Serbia, and in the Persian Gulf are considerably better than if the U.S. had not intervened against Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.
I don't see any alternative that the Bush Administration had to attempting to annihilate Al-Qaeda, and their sponsors and protectors the Taliban. Al-Qaeda was hunting for serious weapons of mass destruction. They killed 250 people in 1998, and 5000 (while aiming for a much larger death toll) in 2001. What would the weapon of choice have been in 2004? How many people would have died? The annihilation of Al-Qaeda seems necessary, and the principle that governments that sponsor and shield organizations that engage in wholesale terrorism put their own existence at risk seems one worth enforcing.
But at the moment we have replaced an utterly detestable Afghan regime in the cities with one that is only somewhat less detestable. Moreover, if (when) the Northern Alliance falls apart and begins shooting at itself we may well find that as far as the Afghan people are concerned we have gone from bad to worse: as Hobbes put it in _Leviathan_ even a tyrannical, detestable, murderous government is better than anarchy dominated by warring bands of armed thugs. To his credit, Colin Powell feared this outcome and tried to prevent it by trying to delay the Northern Alliance attack until he could offer a political solution. To his discredit, George W. Bush "doesn't do nation-building," and the U.S. is about to turn over those political problems to the U.N., which has neither carrots nor sticks, and is likely to fail.
Moreover, the war against the Taliban is not over: we will now see whether a guerrilla insurgency can survive if it lacks outside logistical support. Or perhaps we shall see just how strong the Taliban's and Al-Qaeda's network of support across the leaky Pakistani border is.
In the longer run and the broader run... I don't know what is going on. It depends on what Al-Qaeda had in mind on September 10.
One possibility is that the leaders of Al-Qaeda's view of the U.S. was formed by Bill Clinton's "rapid disengagement" in Somalia: that they believed that successive terrorist strikes against the U.S. would produce withdrawal of the U.S. from the Middle East, as being a game not worth the candle.
A second is that the assassination of Massood and the September 11 terror attack were integrated parts of the same strategy, which was to destroy the only credible leader who could hold the Northern Alliance together in the long run, and to provoke a reaction by the U.S. that would cause it to deploy its troops in the same theater of operation where the Russians had lost their war in the 1980s. Then atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance as it degenerated into anarchy coupled by the defeat of U.S. forces in Afghanistan would produce a revolution in the lands of Islam that would end with Osama bin Laden being installed as Caliph.
Lots of people believe in Possibility 2. I am more skeptical, because it seems to me to bear a remarkable resemblance to the plot of _Dune_ with the United States cast as the Galactic Empire and Osama bin Laden in the role of Paul Atreides: that novel is part of our cultural heritage and a natural interpretive framework for us to grab at, but I don't think it is part of his.
If Possibility 2 is correct--if Al-Qaeda's purpose is to draw U.S. forces deeper into the Middle East and "heighten the contradictions," and if they are correct in their possible hope that heightened contradictions will produce millions of male teenager from Morocco to Sulawesi is wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt and using Microsoft Flight Simulator to practice crashing airliners into tall buildings--then we are all in big trouble.
After all, large-scale religiously-motivated mass murder is not something new. Remember that on August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew's Day, the Huguenots, the Protestants of Paris, were massacred by the soldiers of the French crown, by the nobles of the Guise faction, and by their own neighbors. The death toll reportedly ran into the tens of thousands. The then-Pope had a medal struck to celebrate and commemorate the downfall of the Huguenots: in public, at least, the Vatican then showed the same glee over the megadeaths as Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants showed over the mass-murder of more than 5000 people who happened to be in the World Trade Center at the wrong time. And of course, there were the atrocities on the other side: consider the systematic slaughter by Protestant English garrisons in Ireland of castaways from the wreck of the Spanish Armada of 1588; consider the rapes and murders committed by the largely Protestant landsknechts in 1527 during the sack of Rome; consider the Protestant Roundhead soldiers who used the stained-glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral for target practice--spiritual brothers of the members of the Taliban who destroyed the Buddhist rock sculptures of Bamiyan for sport.
If we have thought about it, we have given thanks that we have been spared the burden of living in the Age of the Protestant Reformation. But now we fear that we have been doomed, instead, to live in the Age of the Islamic Reformation. The parallels are striking: a dominant clergy and aristocracy that seem to have lost their way and succumbed to materialism; a rising literate middle class; the mass distribution of personal copies of the Holy Book so that people can read it and think for themselves; and then terror, as those who have convinced themselves that they bear the will of God take action, and people fight and die. In Europe it lasted for more than 120 years--with one third of the population of Germany dying in the 30 Years War--before nearly everyone learned that reading ones private copy of the Holy Book did not make one the vessel of the will of God, and that waging Holy War was not a way to save the souls of others, but a way to lose ones own.
If the parallel with Europe's Reformation holds true, the process will take four full generations. What can be done so that it will take only one generation before those who would otherwise become our latter-day Puritans and terrorists recognize that the ideology of "Believe in a loving God, infidel, or die!" is no way to approach the world? The U.S. and other governments seek to establish the principle that governments that sponsor wholesale terrorism that creates megadeaths do not long survive. This is a principle worth establishing--but not at the price of tens of thousands more in civilian dead. All governments are stepping up their systems of surveillance and security. All governments *should* seek to diminish potential flashpoints: if there were only 1/10 as many Israeli settlers on the wrong side of the 1967 border, there would be fewer potential suicide bombers--1/100? 1/10? 1/3?--and the pit out of which we must climb would be less deep. But to those who know that the will of God requires Osama bin Laden as Caliph, the destruction of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, and the abolition of Israel, the root offense remains...
Brad DeLong