If some terrorist outfit is holed up in the inaccessible mountains of Afghanistan, how do you get inside Afghanistan if Afghanistan doesn't want you in? Before 911 Clinton shot 66 missiles at the mountins trying to al Qaeda. They were doing it with technology that let them track ObL's movements as if you could see him across the street.
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Is it true the Taliban government of Afghanisan could not be negotiated with to deal with al Qadea? This is what the Bush administration says (and the Clinton admin before it) but how can we be certain?
I recall Mullah Omar offering to turn in his 'guest', ObL, if the US government would be so kind as to provide evidence of his complicity in 9/11. It seems everyone -- across the political spectrum -- assumed this was merely hot air leaving the US no choice but to use its military to bang down the door. It seemed logical: the Taliban are bad, liberals and conservatives agreed (though placing emphasis on different areas of crime), Mullah Omar is their leader which means he's bad. Bad guys don't tell the truth so the offer is not real. By accepting this premise, invasion seemed to be the only logical action we could take to bring Obl and company 'to justice'.
We all know the results.
And regarding Clinton and the tomahawk missiles...
Lobbing missiles into a 'training camp', regardless of how accurate the weapons are, is an indication of a lack of intelligence beyond a certain crude level -- the level of 'we know they're in this camp at least some of the time.' It was not a demonstration of deep infiltration but of its opposite.
Kelley continues:
Basically, I just think that the juridico-legal answer seems nicer because no one's really thought about how you go after terrorists. As we speak, I know of a few people who are sitting around with a bunch of futuritsts, technologists, the NSC, NSA, FBI, CIA, etc talking about the future of warfare using new tech and new warfare tactics. I shit you not.
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Yes, I believe you. In fact, I'm familiar with some of the proposals which have, so far, come out of these meetings and think tankings and so on (visit cryptome.org for some good stuff). Even a casual viewer of the Discovery Channel or the PBS program NOVA will get a taste of some of the things these folks are working on.
Useless trash the lot of it -- even (especially if) successful from a technical POV.
Fly sized unmanned aerial vehicles, total information awareness databases, liquid body armor for soldiers, genetic engineering of humans to create 'enahnced' soldiers who have a reduced need for sleep, food and other basic human requirements, expert systems to parse for 'suspicious' behavior anywhere, orbitally staged tungsten rods (called "rods from god") that could provide the US with its own arsenal of artificial, targeted asteroids, targeted viruses engineered to kill one person -- and on and on and on.
Almost none of this has anything to do with terrorism and is a form of stroking for the war nerd set. No new technologies are required to deal with terrorism. Terrorists are not ariving from the 24th century or Omicron Ceti III armed with cold fusion rifles, tesseract generators and chromiton emitters -- they're men and women with guns and bombs and plans who can be dealt with through quite conventional means.
The reason these people are sitting around tables and in front of CAD screens dreaming of new tech is because no one wants to address the political origins of terrorism. It's much easier to say it's a wholly new form of warfare (the first mistake, this warfare metaphor) requiring robot armies armed with GPS targeted sonic disrupters.
I don't have any time for these technophiles who're blind to the political realities. They're narrowcasting twits.
But, returning to the 'what is to be done question', let's perform a thought experiment and see how things go.
Let's say that country X is, in fact, harboring terrorists who are quite openly using its soil to stage attacks against the United States. The US could start lobbing cruise missiles (or send in the liquid armored, time travelling super soldiers) or, it could present its evidence before the Security Council and declare, before the world, that it has the right of self defense which will be exercised, legally, if country X does not take the necessary steps or allow others to do so if it cannot handle the situation. UN approval would not be difficult to obtain if the evidence is compelling. In the meantime, interdiction of terrorists attempting to commit murder here could be performed through intelligent policing.
An example of taking the UN seriously as a planetary governing body.
This option was available to the Bush admin following September 11. It chose to exercise its ability to act unilaterally because it could and because of its unhidden contempt for the UN. No one tells the superpower what to do.
By asking, 'what can you do if country X doesn't cooperate?' then accepting the need for new tech and military action, we're accepting the premises of people who are not seeing the situation whole (typical of the 'we need new tools' wonks) or who are simply using the situation to further their autocratic agenda.
.d.