From: "Dennis Robert Redmond" <dredmond at efn.org>
> On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately, this means there is no choice but
> > to accept the Administration's policy for now.
>
> You mean, Colin Powell's policy (the only intelligent man in this
> Administration, seems to me).
================== [NYT] October 7, 2001 A New Kind of War Plan By MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - There has already been one casualty in the Bush administration's war on terrorism: the much-vaunted Powell doctrine.
For several Democratic and Republic administrations, it has been an article of faith that military force, when used, would be overpowering and unrelenting. Washington would not strike a blow before it had a clear political goal and a plan for extracting American forces from the battlefield.
President Bush has a clear political goal: the eradication of the AlQaeda terrorist network and the toppling of the Taliban regime that supports it. But before the Pentagon has fired a single missile at Osama bin Laden or his hosts in Afghanistan, it has signaled that its military planning is guided by an entirely new set of rules.
The war the Pentagon is planning has more do with special forces than overwhelming force. While bombing attacks are very much a part of that plan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has also stressed that the Pentagon is taking a "measured approach."
In part, the Pentagon's new approach stems from the unique challenges of going to war against Mr. bin Laden and his Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan. The rulers of that poor and bloodied nation have headquarters, military forces, airfields and supplies that can be attacked. But they lack the vast armies that the United States military has confronted in past conflicts, reducing the number of military targets.
The Pentagon's planning also reflects a larger political strategy. The administration is trying to make the case that its battle is against terrorists and not the Afghan people. So dropping food to starving refugees may be as important as attacks with laser-guided bombs.
But it is also the case that the Powell doctrine seems inappropriate for many of the terrorist threats that the United States is likely to confront in future years. These foes may well be tiny terrorist cells interspersed among civilian populations, and episodic bombing runs and commando raids may be the best way of taking the fight to the enemy.
The Powell doctrine was born out of the American military's longstanding frustrations in Vietnam. In the Vietnam War, the United States gradually escalated the use of force and declared periodic pauses in its bombing campaign. That gave the diplomats time to talk and the enemy, critics said, time to recoup prepare for a new round of fighting.
A generation of American officers came out of that conflict vowing never to fight that way again, and Colin L. Powell - a young Army officer in Vietnam who rose to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, now, secretary of state - was one of them.
If American force is to be used, they said, it should be overpowering and decisive. American military power would be like a thunderstorm, furious but brief and, preferably, with no entangling commitments.
The purest examples of the Powell doctrine were the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the United States military stormed the country in a several-day blitz and captured its leader, Manuel Noriega, and, of course, the 1991 war with Iraq.
Mr. Powell touted the approach in an interview before George W. Bush took office.
"Once you have established a clear political objective, then it seems to me very wise to achieve that objective, if military force is required, in a decisive way," he said. "Such as kick the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait, such as get rid of the government of Panama totally - not just kick an army out, but get rid of an entire government - that is what we did in 1989, on 12 hours' notice, with overwhelming, decisive force."
Though he has talked about the utility of overwhelming power, Secretary Powell has sometimes said his real point is that American military power needs to be decisive and used only when the political objectives are clear. Even so, the assumption has been that more force would measurably increase the odds of success. But even before the Bush administration embarked on its counterterrorism campaign, it had become clear that the Powell doctrine had its limitations.
The doctrine was sometimes a poor guide to the post-cold-war world's tangled politics and in fact deterred the United States from intervening in Bosnia as ethnic killing raged. Then-General Powell told the first President Bush that the United States would need to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia, and the president demurred. After General Powell was succeeded as chairman of the Joint Chiefs by Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, NATO conducted limited air strikes to lift the siege of Sarajevo, which helped lay the basis for a political settlement.
Certainly, there are cases in which the Powell model might still be useful. The Bush administration has made clear that it is not only going after terrorists but will also hold the governments that shelter them accountable as well. In those cases, American military may still be overpowering and decisive - and include every tool in the tool kit, as General Powell famously explained during the Persian Gulf war.
But in many cases the Powell doctrine seems to be an anachronism. "Unconventional approaches, obviously, are more likely and appropriate than the typical conventional approach," Mr. Rumsfeld said about Afghanistan. "There are not high- value targets. There aren't navies to attack. There are not lands to occupy and hold."
Certainly, the Pentagon is planning to use force to disable the Taliban's air defenses. That would make it easier for the American military to intensify its efforts to track Mr. bin Laden and neutralize the Taliban regime, including what military forces and bases it and the Al Qaeda terrorist network does have.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has suggested that air strikes would be used to force Mr. bin Laden and his followers from their sanctuaries so they could be tracked, captured or attacked.
That puts a premium on the use of discriminate air strikes and commando units. And it is not clear that to increase the number of forces would make American military power in Afghanistan any more decisive.
In fact, the Pentagon has suggested that force alone is not sufficient. The Bush administration's broader aims, it said, depend on obtaining good intelligence from allies in the region, cutting off money to the Taliban and winning support from anti- Taliban forces inside Afghanistan, which are now the beneficiaries of covert American assistance.
More generally, Mr. Rumsfeld has likened the fight against terrorism to the strategy the United States had for containing Soviet power during the cold war. In a most un-Powell- like statement, he warned that there was no clear exit strategy.
"The cold war, it took 50 years, plus or minus," Mr. Rumsfeld said during his trip this week to Cairo. "It did not involve major battles. It involved continuous pressure. It involved cooperation by a host of nations."
"And when it ended, it ended not with a bang, but through internal collapse," he added. "It strikes me that might be a more appropriate way to think about what we are up against here, than would be any major conflict."