That’s a gimme. The tougher challenge for the President and his speech writers will be the paragraphs that come next: the passage where Bush not merely has to pledge to help Afghanistan rebuild (while ducking Karzai’s inconvenient pleas for U.S. troops to help keep its tenuous peace) but, tougher yet, has to answer the question: after Afghanistan, what follows in the “war on terror”? And where?
The uncomfortable truth is that Operation Enduring Freedom, as some tin-eared Pentagon spinmeister dubbed the war against the Taliban, is winding to a thoroughly ambiguous close. It’s all too reminiscent of the Gulf War that Bush’s father fought a decade ago. Like Operation Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom was a technological triumph, a showcase of American military might. But, once again, the bad guys got away. Saddam Hussein still rules in Iraq. And Osama Bin Laden is still at large. (Or dead ? Not according to the latest word from White House officials.)
So what does the U.S. do now? Bin Laden’s terrorist conglomerate, Al Qaeda, stretches–by CIA reckoning–across some 60 countries. Should the U.S. attack all of these? Any of them? Where to start?
The answers that Bush and his top Cabinet advisers have come up with after a month of debate will disappoint the hawks in Republican ranks. Bush will not declare war on Iraq tonight (though he will likely protect his flank by making fierce noises). Instead, according to senior Administration officials involved in drafting his speech, he intends to focus on the single most frightening lesson that the White House has learned from the victory in Afghanistan: the urgent need to get better control of the threat of nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction. Bush tonight will call not merely for tighter safeguards on the world’s stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium–and will foreshadow closer collaboration with his good friend President Vladimir Putin of Russia to achieve those. He will also announce a U.S. push to secure the burgeoning products of the world’s civil nuclear reactors–spent fuel rods that, scattered to the winds by a conventional high-explosive, could poison acres of Washington, New York or any world capital for months or even years.
So WMD–Pentagonese for weapons of mass destruction–rather than Osama Bin Laden will be the focus of the “what next” section of the President’s State of the Union address. And this shift from a man to a weapon signals a more fundamental shift of gears in the “war on terror”–a move from unilateral U.S. military action against defined terrorist targets to a primarily diplomatic effort to persuade other nations to continue action against a more diffuse, more generic and, in some ways, more controversial set of objectives.
Senior Administration officials reject for the record any notion that, after Afghanistan, the U.S. is now embarking on some wider global “Phase Two” of Bush’s declared war on terrorism. From those first dreadful days after the attacks of Sept. 11, they say, the U.S. offensive has been global. The unprecedented international efforts to trace and shut down the terrorists’ banking networks; the vastly franker flow of information between police and security services about known or suspected terrorists; even an increased willingness by notoriously taciturn intelligence agencies to pass on leads and clues–all these, Administration officials say, are the fruits of what were from the start integral elements of Bush’s war on terror. And they have produced results. Suspects have been rounded up from Malaysia to Germany. Terrorist bankers in the Gulf have been identified from cell-phone logs. Bank accounts have been frozen from Hong Kong to Switzerland.
Those efforts will continue. Only the initial military effort was focused on one country–the vipers’ nest itself, Afghanistan. And that campaign, Bush and his advisers have concluded, looks to be unrepeatable.
Not that Bush has ruled out further U.S. strikes. Bin Laden and his surviving Al Qaeda commanders will, Bush aides predict, seek refuge in other Muslim states that are failing or on the brink of failure: they point to Somalia, Yemen, Sudan as the likeliest bolt-holes, with the more robust nations of Indonesia and the Philippines as possible fallbacks. Wherever Bin Laden surfaces, the U.S. will pursue him as relentlessly as God pursued Cain across the wilderness. This is a hunt to the death. If the U.S. gets hard intelligence that pinpoints Bin Laden’s whereabouts, expect U.S. action–whether by Special Forces (to capture him) or by air strikes (to kill him) will depend almost wholly on cold military judgments about effectiveness. Nothing more. When it comes to Bin Laden versus national sovereignty, the U.S. will ask forgiveness later rather than permission beforehand.
Against the wider network of Al Qaeda affiliates, however–that confederation of seemingly semi-independent groups spread across so many nations–the U.S. strategy from here is to persuade, and if necessary help, those countries to take action themselves.
As Bush advisers explain it, each country harboring an Al Qaeda cell or affiliate has to confront two questions. Do they have the will to take action against this terrorist presence? And do they have the capability? If they have will but no capability, the U.S. stands ready to help. Which is a polite way of saying that that Washington will make them an offer they can’t refuse. This approach, officials say, is already paying off. They point to the Philippines, where brutal arm-twisting by Washington has persuaded the president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, to put her own political survival at risk by agreeing to the insertion of some 600 U.S. Special Forces as “advisers” and “trainers” in the struggle against the Al Sayyaf insurgency in the southern islands. Yemen is accepting less intrusive U.S. help. Sudan is making nice noises. The Administration even plans a cautious rebuilding of contacts with Indonesia, tentatively restoring military to military links that were severed by Congressional edict after the Indonesian army’s rampage of terror through East Timor.
And those countries which demonstrate they have no will to combat Al Qaeda groups on their soil? The gloves are off. If the intelligence information warrants it, the U.S. will take unilateral action.
Even in this more far-flung campaign against Al Qaeda worldwide, though, the approach that Bush has decreed is selective. Yes, active terrorist insurgencies like the Philippines’ Al Sayyaf will be crushed. But in general, as Bush aides describe it, the U.S. will seek to focus its efforts. Rather than going after Al Qaeda “foot soldier by foot soldier” or even “node by node”, the Administration has concluded that a more productive approach will be to target what a senior Administration official described as “the strategists and the operatives for the network”–in other words, the big fish.
This, like everything else in the Phase Two strategy, reflects what the Administration thinks it has learned about Al Qaeda since Sept. 11. The pattern was clear even before Bin Laden confirmed it in that preening video in which he laid out the mechanics of the World Trade Center operation for his Saudi guest. Self-contained cells of ignorant foot-soldiers–the cannon fodder of his crusade–are motivated, supplied, financed and, only at the last minute, directed to their targets by an elite corps of intermediaries who alone have contact with Bin Laden and his lieutenants. Eliminate those go-betweens, therefore, and you largely disarm the foot-soldiers, who can then be picked up at relative leisure.
President Bush’s focus on weapons of mass destruction similarly reflects what U.S. intelligence has learned since Sept. 11–specifically, the intelligence take from Al Qaeda’s houses and compounds that U.S. forces have raided in Afghanistan. That Bin Laden aspires to obtain nuclear or biological weapons was already known–testimony in the New York trial of some of the conspirators behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in east Africa showed that. What the intelligence haul from Afghanistan has shown is the deadly seriousness of Bin Laden’s ambitions. He had acquired the necessary know-how by recruiting two senior figures from Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. He was actively seeking weapons grade and reactor-grade fissile materials from Russia and from former Soviet states. He was clearly exploring how to use reactor-fuel rods as the core of what weaponeers call a ’nuclear dispersion device’–in plain terms, a radiation bomb–as a second-best to a Hiroshima or Nagasaki-type atomic bomb. As U.S. analysts parse the problem, to acquire a nuclear weapon you need three elements:know-how; technology; and fissile material. Bin Laden had one, and was well on the way to acquiring another. Only the fabrication technology–the means to put the pieces together–seems to have eluded him. But even that may not be the case. Perhaps U.S. intelligence hasn’t yet stumbled on the right cave in Afghanistan.
