Author: Andrew Marshall
Publication: The Independent, UK
Date: March 10, 2002
'Bush Is Still Winning War There,
but He Begins to Lose Battle Here," said the headline in yesterday's New
York Times. The assumption that the United States is at least winning There
is widespread, and with good reason. US forces brought down the Taliban
regime in Afghanistan with terrific speed. And yet the apparent success
of the military strategy is illusory. That, as American officials and generals
know all too well, is why the conflict will go on for years, and why Winning
There is as far away as ever.
For a start, as Gertrude Stein once
said, there is no There there. Afghanistan isn't the problem and it isn't
the enemy, as the Americans have said repeatedly, and it was not their
goal to get control of it. The victory, such as it was, was to deny al-Qai'da
use of Afghan territory as a base for command, organisation, training and
recruitment. That hasn't been achieved, which is why fighting continues.
But even if it is achieved, al-Qa'ida
remains. Command structures and cells outside the country still exist,
even if they have been badly damaged. And al-Qa'ida's goal - to remove
US influence from Islamic countries - is still viable. Its tools remain
the same: massive terrorist attacks on US targets in the region and beyond.
And its intermediate objectives are the same: to create a split between
Saudi Arabia and the US, to highlight the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
and to use US strategy towards Iraq to divide Islamic opinion. Al-Qa'ida
can be said to have achieved a lot in the past six months, even if its
bunkers and safe houses are gone and some of its members are dead.
By focusing all its early public
efforts on Afghanistan, the US virtually guaranteed a quick initial victory.
It used a tried and tested programme of massive air strikes to disable
Afghan command and control centres, and suppress Afghan air defences. But
these were not exactly formidable targets. Then the Northern Alliance,
fighting as the US's proxies, swept the Taliban out of power.
At Tora Bora, we were led to believe
we were seeing al- Qa'ida's Last Stand. Yet now we find ourselves, unaccountably,
facing another Last Stand in the mountains. The reality is that this is
no more the end than was Tora Bora, and nor can there be, in this kind
of a campaign, any finality. After six months of fighting, probably the
best depiction of the US's victories in Afghanistan, and its failures,
is: al-Qa'ida is dead, long live al-Qa'ida.
Al-Qa'ida - literally "the base"
- is broken as a cohesive single unit, the command structure scattered
to the winds, and individual cells fighting, or biding their time, on their
own. But hundreds of individuals are out there somewhere, perhaps in the
mountains of Afghanistan, perhaps in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Chechnya,
Georgia, or perhaps in condominiums in Florida, blocks of flats in Maida
Vale, or tenements in Brussels.
A war of the sort that the US is
fighting is a military war, a war of intelligence and a political war.
Militarily it has done well, though not as well as it thought it had. Afghanistan
is now unsafe as a haven for al-Qa'ida and its supporters. Although hundreds,
thousands even, remain in the hills, they cannot organise a global effort
in the same way that they did six months ago.
In intelligence terms, the results
are harder to judge. Al- Qa'ida is an even looser confederation than it
was before. Its behaviour is harder to guess at, and plans developed over
the past five years are still live.
In political terms - the only ones
that matter - the task is formidable. Al-Qa'ida does not have to erase
the US: it simply has to drive wedges between Washington and Islamic opinion
- hardly a difficult exercise at the best of times. The US must end its
ability to do that. Its target needs to be clearer too. The Taliban was
never the point of this exercise. Neither was Afghanistan, nor even Osama
bin Laden himself. The objective was supposed to be to end the ability
of al-Qa'ida to operate.
This is a war with long-time horizons.
The African embassy bombings and US retaliation against Afghanistan and
(mistakenly) Sudan were in 1998; it was three years before al-Qa'ida struck
back at the US. Perhaps there will be terrorist attacks this weekend. Perhaps
they will come on the anniversary of the bombing. Perhaps in two or three
years.
The next stage of the war is already
well under way. The US is concentrating on the possible alternative havens
for al-Qa'ida, places where individuals and perhaps command elements might
relocate: Yemen, Georgia, Somalia, perhaps Sudan. Already we are being
prepared for the next phase of the war, against Iraq. The aim is to remove
Saddam, but also to end the unsustainable stalemate in western policy towards
Iraq that presents Mr bin Laden with such an obvious opportunity.
The real problem with the War on
Terrorism is that every term within it is almost impossible to define in
the crisp, tactical terms that a military solution requires. War? Terrorism?
But also: There? And, perhaps most difficult of all: Winning?