</FONT> Sorry to inflict this on you, but I've been bottling this sort of thing up during enforced absence ....
Below are a few comments on Carrol's central question – will this work -. There are elements of bum-talking to it, but I think I'm still bringing the exponential moving average down rather than up. My credentials in military strategy are fairly shaky and amateur, but I've done hard time with Schelling and von Neumann on game theory and deterrence, so I think I'm on solid ground there. My general political stance remains the same; I'm in favour of more meat in the pies, more booze in the beer and fewer hours in the day, and against more or less everything else.
There are an awful lot of really bad arguments and a fair few really badly misused good arguments going round on this subject. The most dangerous, and the most dangerously wrong one is that "you can't negotiate with terrorists". I don't know where anyone gets this idea from. The examples of the Kenyan Mau-Mau, the ANC, the IRA (1916 and 1970s incarnations), the Stern gang, ETA and indeed the founding fathers of the USA teach us two things:
1) You always end up negotiating with terrorists. 2) Nine times out of ten, the terrorists have at least a kernel of legitimacy to their demands, and usually much more.
I'm using "terrorist" in the sense of a guerilla movement with popular support in a civilian population, other than those whose action is largely aimed at an occupying army. I think it's terribly important to have a definition which doesn't smuggle in a load of value judgements which don't help rational analysis of the issue.
The important thing to notice is that, unlike a regular army, a terrorist army has an economic base which does not vary with movements of battle lines. The supply of resources to terrorist armies is dependent on a civilian population who are not active combatants but who are prepared to support combatants. There are two important implications of this:
1) Terrorist movements are extraordinarily difficult to eradicate by military means. Even crushing military defeats do not have a material effect on their ability to field new units. As long as the civilian population is willing and able to supply manpower, it will support a terrorist movement.
2) Unlike regular military powers, terrorist powers are not expansionist. They can't hold territory and gain no benefit from doing so. They can't expand their demands beyond the grievances of the constituents of their economic base. Contented populations don't support terrorists.
I will also hypothesise a thrid proposition about terrorists:
3) Because terrorists are not states and do not have the apparatus of persuasion which is available to a state, they cannot maintain their population on a war footing unaided, without that population having independent reasons to consider itself to be at war. To put it another way, civilian populations don't suport terrorists unless there is something they want very badly indeed and can't get any other way.
The second proposition, I think, more or less does for the idea that negotiation with terrorists is similar to Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in any important way. If we agree to most of bin Laden's demands, he _can't_ just randomly expand those demands "because he detects weakness". The limit of what he can demand is the limit of what Arab opinion cares so much about that it's willing to die for. It's also likely that bombing doesn't even have any deterrent effect on future populations who might be organised in support of a terrorist army, because 3) suggests that populations don't tend to take this action when they have any alternative anyway. You can't deter a cornered rat by baring your teeth.
The first and third propositions form the argument for stopping the bombing now, and it seems very persuasive to me. No terrorist group in history has been made to submit to military force (one might possibly except the Baader-Meinhof organisation, but they look to me much more like a criminal gang than like Al Quaeda). In one way or another, terrorist activity is brought to an end by negotiation, so why risk our lives and those of others by having a few more senseless and cruel martyr creation operations?
There is perhaps a loophole in 1) for the bombers, however. While the existence of _a_ terrorist movement cannot be stamped out by military force, this does not mean that _any_particular_ terrorist group has its existence guaranteed. An army is more than its economic base; it also needs its leaders and supply channels. So if one believed that Osama bin Laden a) was the leader of the terrorist unit which carried out the WTC attacks and b) was uniquely more horrible or bloodthirsty than any alternative Arab terrorist leaders, two propositions for which the evidence is no better than reasonable, then there would be a justification for military action aimed at removing him personally (in pure terms of "will it work"). A generalised version of the same argument for the whole Al Quaeda/Taliban operation probably goes through.
So, I think there are only two defensible alternative strategies; surrender (in the sense of doing a lot of things we ought to do anyway) now or surrender later. Either we negotiate with bin Laden, or we kill him and negotiate with his successor. If the current operation has a purpose at all (which I frankly doubt), then we are taking the gamble that the next Arab terrorist leader will be easier to deal with than bin Laden, and that this is worth the obvious cost in terms of probable Western deaths and certain Afghan deaths in the meantime.
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