How the U.S. will fight
A combination of special forces, lethal stealth, diplomacy and old-fashioned military power will be used to battle terrorists.
By Damien Cave and Anthony York
Sept. 20, 2001 | The United States inched closer to retaliating for last week's brutal terrorist attacks Thursday, moving U.S. warships and dozens of fighter planes to the Middle East and "possibly points east," according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Neither President Bush nor Rumsfeld offered details on the movements, which are part of the campaign the Pentagon has dubbed "Operation Infinite Justice."
The dramatic designation falls rhetorically in line with President Bush's call for a "crusade" against terrorism and the states that support it, but how exactly will we implement it? How will the Bush administration fight what it has repeatedly called a "different kind of war?"
These questions don't have easy answers, but according to military experts, Bush will likely employ a complex combination of military approaches, in addition to diplomatic, law-enforcement and financial moves. A wholesale invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is extremely improbable, they say. Instead, experts expect localized, surgical strikes, both on the air and on the ground, which will then become part of a sustained campaign that will look more like police work than a standard military operation. The operation may carry the dramatic "Infinite Justice" title, they argue, but in fact, it will probably comprise a series of specific investigations and attacks, many of them unseen by the public and the press.
"You need to keep yourself from thinking in terms of a single response," says Gen. William Nash, who commanded 25,000 multinational soldiers in Bosnia, and is now director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "This is going to take a while, and by its very nature be a sophisticated and complex operation. And there will be a lot of different things going on, not all of which will bear fruit right off the bat."
Some of the assaults will have nothing to do with the military, says Michele Flournoy, senior advisor for international security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.
"It's very important to put this in the context of the broader campaign and strategy, which includes non-military instruments," she says. "Law enforcement efforts here and abroad, denying terrorists access to financial resources and diplomatic pressure to keep governments from providing safe havens will all be used."
Regardless of these extra-military tactics, experts predict that the war on terrorism will likely begin with a conventional strike at Afghanistan. The redeployment of troops and carriers in the region, coupled with Bush's increasingly loud saber rattling, means it is likely that there will be some sort of strike on the bases and training camps that have been used by Osama bin Laden in recent months.
Most of these sites are probably empty of people and important supplies, acknowledges Harvey Sapolsky, director of MIT's security studies program. But "if there are places where terrorists train, I can't see that the U.S. will leave those alone," he says. "We will visit Afghanistan because we have a grievance against the Taliban."
The U.S. may target both bin Laden's camps and sites that are precious to the Taliban, Afghanistan's Muslim rulers. Missiles and planes, launched either from isolated bases in Pakistan or from aircraft carriers, could attack the Taliban's government buildings and military targets if the Taliban refuses to give up bin Laden.
Any future action in Afghanistan "will be in some ways similar to what we've been doing in Iraq," says Owen Cote, associate director of the MIT program. "We've basically been bombing Iraq steadily for the last couple of months, and there hasn't been a lot of attention focused on that. Here, I think you're going to be doing things on a relatively continuous basis."