The U.S. should have gotten an early clue about how hard it would be to win the war in Afghanistan — or even to define winning — on the bright morning of Nov. 26, less than an hour after the city of Kunduz fell to the Northern Alliance. Instead of celebrating that important victory, rival Alliance factions began firing rockets and automatic rifles at each other in a fight over the spoils of war. A Northern Alliance fighter, seeing everyone in the main square start to panic at the violent chaos, made a point of shouting at me, “It’s happy shooting. They are happy. Happy.”
He said the last word in a particularly manic way, delivering it like a tennis ball aimed at my head. I told him that they didn’t look very happy, since they were, after all, shooting at each other.
Moments later, the center of Kunduz was empty of everyone except gunmen.
The fighter’s absurd statement was a valiant if unconvincing attempt to spin the factional fighting that gripped Kunduz that Monday morning, one of the first breakdowns of an embryonic Afghan civil order, and a harbinger of worse times to come. In fact, a larger-scale version of Kunduz that morning is exactly what the Bush administration and the international peacekeeping coalition are dealing with today. Since the rout of the Taliban government, there have been fierce outbreaks of violence between warlords, harassment of ethnic minorities and rampant banditry, as well as evidence that both Iran and Pakistan continue to exercise their influence in the politics of Afghanistan, which has been the world’s boxing ring for the past quarter century. Demarcated by land mines and surrounded by lunatics, Afghanistan will know stability only if the U.S. makes an aggressive and not-at-all ambivalent commitment to building it.
And yet the U.S. seems unwilling to make that commitment. A Feb. 20 New York Times story referenced a classified CIA report warning of further chaos and fighting between warlords if ethnic tensions are not reduced. That’s a straightforward observation, but exactly how to accomplish this task has apparently split the administration into two camps. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, articulating the Pentagon’s hands-off view, believes that the U.S. should back the creation of a national army for Afghanistan and avoid costly peacekeeping missions.
“Why put all the time and money and effort in that?” Rumsfeld said, referring to a State Department plan to increase the number of peacekeepers and extend their reach to cities beyond Kabul. “Why not put it into helping them develop a national army so that they can look out for themselves over time?”
Rumsfeld’s plan has a familiar, common-sense ring to it, like a speech given by a stern father to a no-good kid when it’s time for him to get a job. It will also lead to disaster.
Although a national army is crucial for Afghanistan’s long-term security, such an institution will be years in the making. To form a national army, after all, you need a nation, and the truth is that there isn’t enough nation yet in the inchoate chaos known as Afghanistan to develop, control or maintain an army. Afghanistan is a patchwork of tribes and ethnicities, divided and distrustful, each with their own warlord patron who claims to be the only defense against hostile forces. Major warlords control almost every large city and its surrounding provinces — Gul Aga Shirzai, a Pashtun, controls Kandahar; Ismail Khan, a Tajik, has Herat; and Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek trained by the Soviets, is the boss of Mazar-e-Sharif — and in this feudal system, each man has his own private gravitational field, a fuzzy security region that extends in direct proportion to his military influence, outside of which is lawlessness and banditry.
Here’s a snapshot of what happens when warlords cross each other in the new regime. I’d been in Kandahar only one day when my friend Amanullah Khan stopped by with interesting news. “Something’s happening,” he said. “Gul Aga Shirzai and Ismail Khan are going to war. Herat and Kandahar will start fighting soon.” Reports that fighters loyal to Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik, had been abusing Pashtuns had been filtering down to the Kandaharis, and they were outraged. It was Jan. 29, five days after Gul Aga had addressed a crowd of thousands in Kandahar, saying that he would wait and see what the Karzai government instructed him to do about Khan’s mistreatment of Pashtuns, saying that he preferred talking to fighting. But now everyone I spoke to was expecting bloodshed. Ismail Khan was rumored to have moved his troops south from Herat into a province controlled by Gul Aga, and in response, Gul Aga had moved his forces north and the rival factions were facing each other, ready to go at any moment. Men gathering to watch Indian television at a teahouse that evening were talking excitedly about the prospect of war.
Then, just as soon as it came up, the situation resolved itself. Frantic calls were made. Beards were stroked, and the problem suddenly vanished. What caused the almost-battle, of course, did not go away. Violent reprisals against Pashtuns were not limited to Herat. In the north near Kunduz, Uzbeks under Dostum’s control had been beating and robbing Pashtuns in the guise of disarmament, and the Kandaharis knew about that as well. Future warlord clashes are almost inevitable.
And at least a few of the warlords have powerful allies. Ismail Khan, for instance, is not just your average recalcitrant Afghan gunman; Iran is covertly supplying his men with thousands of brand-new Egyptian AK-47s, in a strategy to keep him as their proxy warlord and possibly prevent the Karzai government from unifying the country. In Afghanistan’s recent past, it is this proxy effect that has fueled ethnic tensions and kept the country in a state of perpetual civil war. When news of Iran’s military aid to Khan made its way to the United States, the State Department warned Iran to steer clear of Afghan affairs and refrain from undermining the current regime. Journalists who asked to visit the bases where Khan’s fighters were training under the guise of Iranian advisors were told bluntly to forget about it.
What does it all mean? It means the U.S./Northern Alliance victory quickly rolled Afghanistan back to a pre-Taliban boil of warlords, and the war planners are busy searching for a lid. Lately, it’s come in the form of airstrikes and special forces operations, but this is not enough to arrive at a lasting peace, only the bandit peace that war-weary Afghans have to live with for now, which will likely turn many of them into supporters of warlords, however unsavory, who can keep them safe.
What must the U.S. do? Much more than it seems prepared to. And the process may well take more than a decade — not all that long, given what the country has suffered through. First, the international security assistance force (ISAF) must grow rapidly to 100,000 troops. ISAF can, with its increased strength, branch out to cities beyond Kabul, where it has worked fairly effectively, and help restore public confidence in the civil order. In Afghanistan, the vast empty space between warlords is never secure. Most of the road separating the powers in Kabul from Gul Aga’s sphere of influence, for instance, is too dangerous to drive, but the citizens don’t have much choice if they need to travel from one city to another. (The technique is to leave early in the morning, drive as fast as possible and stop for absolutely nothing.) If ISAF took on the bandits and secured the roads, the gratitude of the Afghan people would go off the charts and the mission would gain enormous public support. The Taliban first gained credibility by ending banditry and road extortion in Kandahar province, and that was not an accident of history.
Next, and this is dangerous, the warlords must be completely disarmed, and Iran and Pakistan restrained by aggressive diplomacy. It should be obvious that leaving private armies in Afghanistan will result in civil war in a matter of months. Just as soon as the Americans and ISAF return home, the fuse will light and Afghans will re-experience the horrors of 1992-93, the worst years of the civil war. Armed principalities don’t make a nation.
The list of critical next steps seems to go on without end. Protection from famine and drought. Medicine and basic health care. Representative government. The creation of national institutions like an army. Afghanistan has a young population desperately in need of work and willing to do it. There are all manner of things to build — roads, hospitals, schools — and an organization similar to the WPA is the way to start the process. Our help rebuilding the country offers us a measure of redemption from our complicity in its destruction, going back to the war against the Soviets, and our subsequent abandonment of Afghanistan during the last decade.
The cornerstones of a peaceful Afghanistan are not so distant as they would seem, but it requires what they call in the aid business “a sustained commitment.” And there is good reason to fear that the administration, which has already eschewed nation-building as overly expensive and a general pain in the ass, will give Afghanistan a token of its affection and then simply move on to the next crisis. It doesn’t have to be that way, of course, and significant public pressure might alter the U.S. government’s posture in the region. It’s also certain that the administration’s either-or take on how to help Afghanistan — peacekeepers or the foundation of a national army — is a mistake. Peace will require both.
When I was in Afghanistan, soldiers often came up to me with the same question: Will America help us rebuild? Ashamed, I had to say that I didn’t know the answer. It should, of course, be yes. Throughout both my stays there, I saw the way Afghans treated journalists as their couriers to the West, saying to us, “Tell them that we need security, clean water. Tell them we want to live in peace.” We had to make sure to write it all down. Every request was made with a visceral longing for what we live with day after day, and we took these messages back in notebooks and tried not to forget them. It is miraculous that more Afghans are not bitter about what they have gone through, that so many look to the future with a fair measure of hope.
It seemed to me that for many of the Afghans I met, the meaning of peace transcended the absence of war. The word promised a resurrection of their civilization.
That was another message I came home deterrmined to deliver.
The Bush cheering squad that is still applauding his prosecution of the war in Afghanistan should hold off on the victory parades. Recent news reports are now confirming that Osama bin Laden (remember him, the demonic mastermind behind Sept. 11 whom the president once labeled his No. 1 target?) and most of his top lieutenants are alive and well, as is the Taliban’s one-eyed despot, Mullah Omar, and his top deputy. While the president searches for evildoers in other far-flung corners of the globe, the man responsible for more American deaths than anyone in Baghdad, Tehran or Pyongyang is merrily sending out e-mails to friends and supporters, including heartfelt condolences to the family of a deceased Afghan cleric. As the administration was forced to acknowledge last week, only one senior al-Qaida official has been killed or captured — Muhammad Atef, the terror network’s top military strategist. And the FBI has not even removed his name from its list of most wanted terrorists because his death remains unconfirmed.
Apparently frustrated by its inability to track down the terrorist leaders, the Bush team has begun to downplay their significance. The president once told the world that he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.” But nowadays he never even mentions the holy warrior with a lust for American blood — and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has begun telling the press that bin Laden and his loathsome circle are not that important in the overall scheme of America’s anti-terror war. Try selling that one to New York City firefighters — or the rest of the American public, for that matter.
At least Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of the Afghanistan campaign, had the decency to concede his mission remains glaringly incomplete. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, Franks nodded in agreement when Sen. Jim Bunning bluntly told him, “I’m not pleased, and I don’t think any Americans are pleased that we haven’t done a better job on al-Qaida.” The Pentagon strategy of relying on Afghan warlords and heavy American bombing to secure the Tora Bora region where al-Qaida leaders were holed up, now seems an undeniable blunder. It might have minimized American casualties — more journalists than GIs have died as a result of enemy fire — but it failed to stop bin Laden and his band from melting away, probably across the poorly guarded Pakistan border. One military analyst quoted in last week’s Boston Globe called the bombing-centered strategy “shooting a hornet’s nest with a shotgun.”
Without the head of bin Laden (and of key deputies like the doctor of death, Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri), the Bush war in Afghanistan is looking more and more like Gulf War II, a replay of his father’s half-victory against Saddam Hussein, which left the dangerous dictator in power. The analogy is not exact: Bin Laden does not rule a country, and his terror network may have received a far more damaging blow than Saddam received. And, of course, luck may fall our way one of these days — the $25 million bounty on bin Laden’s turbaned head might finally prompt a local fortune hunter to ambush the world’s most wanted terrorist. But the Bush administration’s apparent haste to move on to other quarry, like North Korea’s hermit tyrant or the obscure band of thugs marauding on a distant Philippines island, is not reassuring.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan — the country we were aiming to rescue by eliminating the Taliban and its terrorist backers — is a mess. According to a classified CIA report made public last week, the country is not exactly on the brink of civil war, but it’s close. Warlords and other assorted thugs control the entire country outside the capital city of Kabul — and even there the popular British peacekeepers have been fired upon and civil order is still shaky. Reports in the press — including those from Salon’s war correspondent Phillip Robertson — paint a picture of a country whose valiant efforts toward peace and justice are widely frustrated by what its decent but beleaguered interim leader Hamid Karzai calls “the culture of the knife and the gun.” Crime is rampant, even in Kabul and its surrounding villages, which are patrolled by 4,000 soldiers from Britain and other countries. Even relief workers have been kidnapped and killed. Last week, Dallas Morning News correspondent Gregg Jones filed a discouraging report about life in the Kabul area, where Northern Alliance “liberators” have reverted to form and are terrorizing the local populace, killing and robbing and preying on young women. “Many of the same Northern Alliance soldiers who were here before the Taliban are here again, and they took many girls away before,” a young medical student named Nasima Makhail told Jones, explaining why she still covered herself in public. “Under the burqa we feel safer.” (Those warlords who prefer boys are also back to their pederastic ways, according to another story in last week’s New York Times.)
And outside Kabul, law and order is practically nonexistent, as Salon’s Robertson documented when he took his life in his hands by traveling by car from Kabul to Kandahar, a route preyed on by heavily armed teenagers and highwaymen on motorcycles. When not worrying about bandits and warlords, the people who live in the Afghan countryside must contend with malnutrition and disease. And the drug business is back in full force, with farmers once again planting fields of opium poppies, even though Karzai has demanded it stop.
Despite Karzai’s tireless efforts, government in Afghanistan remains a pipe dream. His own cabinet has been torn by sectarian violence, with assassins from one faction throwing his aviation minister from a plane and stabbing him to death on the tarmac two weeks ago. Government agencies, which have so far received just a sliver of the foreign aid promised them, cannot pay their own staffs. And with less military clout than a highway brigand, Karzai has no power to enforce his government’s will. “Basically, Karzai is a hostage in his own palace,” a Kabul businessman told Jones. “He doesn’t have an army, and if you don’t have an army in Afghanistan, you don’t have power.”
As Rumsfeld has acknowledged, “It’s not a pretty picture.” And administration officials are making the right noises about helping set it straight. They’re telling the press that this Bush won’t abandon Afghanistan, the way the first one did after the Soviet defeat there in 1989. They won’t allow Afghanistan to slide into chaos and once again become a breeding ground for terrorism. But at the same time, Rumsfeld and his lieutenants are declaring they’re dead set against “nation-building” in the ravaged country and “mission creep.” The Pentagon has offered to help Afghanistan build its own military — but that could take more than a year, and in the meantime, the country is at the mercy of its most savage forces.
The rock-jawed defense secretary who makes conservative pundits go weak in the knees won’t even flex his muscles on behalf of the international peackeeping force. Karzai has pleaded with Washington to help expand the force so it can bring peace to more than Kabul, but Rumsfeld has told him, sorry, the bugles in the war on terror are calling America’s armed forces elsewhere — and besides, we don’t want to get our hands dirty with the messy work of peace enforcement. We just do the glamorous opening salvos — our allies can clean up behind us. But abandoning Afghanistan would be inexcusable, for both practical and moral reasons. Practically, if we don’t put Afghanistan on the road to recovery — and yes, that means nation-building — it will collapse into terror-friendly anarchy. And morally, we owe something to the blameless Afghan people: After all, we just bombed their country. Yes, it was necessary and yes, we rid them of their tyrants, but in the process we created more rubble and misery in a country that has seen far too much of both.
Speaking of Rumsfeld, just what is the secret of this man’s appeal? I can understand why some conservatives, with their deep need for strong father figures, get all gooey over his man-of-few-words Pentagon briefings. But why is the so-called liberal press so enamored of him? Are they grateful that a Washington authority figure “respects” them enough to tell them he’s not going to tell them the truth? Are they relieved that an administration presided over by a goofy and inexperienced leader — someone who still seems weirdly young at age 55 — has a grown-up at home? Where was the blast of criticism from the media that should have immediately followed Rumsfeld’s outrageous refusal last week to apologize for the screwed-up U.S. raid that killed at least 16 anti-Taliban fighters? Apparently apologies are for wimps like Clinton. This is precisely the kind of attitude that has so endeared our country to the rest of the world in recent weeks.
Over the weekend, the New York Times ran yet another story about our European allies “seething” over America’s “we are the champions of the world” act. After Sept. 11, Europe rallied to the American cause — the attacks gave President Bush “the wind of virtue,” in the Times’ words. But this international solidarity has now disappeared, gone with the winds of Bush administration arrogance.
The Europeans aren’t the only ones feeling royally had by the White House these days. There are many of us at home who fully supported massive military retaliation against bin Laden and his terror apparatus. We still do. But as Chris Matthews astutely commented on Saturday’s “Hardball,” the war against bin Laden — what Matthews calls “the firefighters’ war” — has been “hijacked” by neoconservatives with their own agenda. Somewhere around Tora Bora, Bush took a wrong turn and ended up on the road to Tehran and God knows where else. What is this neoconservative agenda? Matthews has suggested it’s related to this lobby’s support for Israel. But it’s arguable whether putting aside bin Laden in favor of chasing evil around the world serves Israel’s interests. And it certainly doesn’t serve America’s. (Talk about mission creep!)
On Sept. 11 the smug, amoral Saudi princeling named Osama bin Laden escalated his war on America. And with his galling air of superiority, bin Laden keeps promising to see this war through to its conclusion. Unfortunately, our own well-born leader lacks bin Laden’s sense of focus. Bush’s mission has struck off hither and yon and is in danger of losing not only international support but its very meaning. “Those who’ve escaped [the U.S. military] and are in Pakistan or Iran say al-Qaida and the Taliban are in safe places and preparing a counteroffensive,” a Saudi sympathizer of bin Laden gloated in the Financial Times last week. “This tells supporters that the U.S. is living a fake triumph.” If the United States is to win a real victory, it must single-mindedly track down the bin Laden cabal and make sure Afghanistan never again becomes a garden for their type of pestilence.
Rummy was on a rant. Three days after nosy journalists reported on a special operations raid in Afghanistan — while it was still underway — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld marched into the Pentagon press room and delivered a lecture about the proper limits of providing information to the press.
The reports on the raid, he lamented, “appeared, obviously, as the result of someone in the Pentagon leaking classified information … It floors me that people are willing to do that.” After a few remarks about the importance of a free press, Rumsfeld explained the rules for this new kind of warfare: “Our goal is not to demystify things for the other side.”
Fair enough. But what about the instances when Rumsfeld and his senior aides have appeared to do just that? This week, Rumsfeld detailed how pilots bombing Taliban forces get some of their key targeting information, when he revealed that “a very modest number of [American] ground troops” were in northern Afghanistan, coordinating airstrikes with opposition forces there. Rumsfeld was merely acknowledging what had become an open secret — but also broadcasting it to anybody with a satellite dish, just in case they hadn’t figured it out for themselves.
A week earlier, Rumsfeld telegraphed plans to begin bombing Taliban frontline forces, after he was asked about reports that Taliban troops were actually fleeing to the frontlines, which they perceived as being relatively safe. “I suspect that in the period ahead, that’s not going to be a very safe place to be,” Rumsfeld warned. Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, has tipped off the Taliban on occasion.
On Day 2 of the war, a reporter asked Myers if the United States had fired any Tomahawk missiles. Myers answered, “We will use some Tomahawk missiles today from ships,” helping clarify what those projectiles going overhead might be for any viewers in Afghanistan. Of course, the insights followed forceful insistence by Rumsfeld that “we do not discuss operational activities.”
Presumably, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs are not abetting the enemy. But they are discovering that in a war with a huge propaganda front, a continuous flow of information is as important to the war effort as an uninterrupted supply of bombs.
As a result, there are almost daily violations of Rumsfeld’s dictum not to discuss operational matters with the press or the public. Some even come from Rummy himself, speaking from the podium. Many more are planted by unnamed “senior defense officials,” such as an Oct. 10 Associated Press story that cited three such insiders promising that U.S. planes would soon start dropping 5,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs to destroy caves and tunnels.
“It’s almost comical, the juxtaposition between leaks like this and Bush and Rumsfeld’s stern lectures on the sanctity of classified info,” observes Owen Cote, a national security expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Usually these leaks, sanctioned or otherwise, are intended to convey some hopeful news when none is obvious, or to counter the impression that the war is a halfhearted affair. They sometimes garner full-throated headlines such as “U.S. Said to Plan Copter Raids in Afghanistan” (New York Times, Oct. 10), or “Pentagon May Set up Base in Afghanistan Soon” (USA Today, Oct. 29). In reality, the Pentagon is planning for every conceivable scenario in Afghanistan short of nuclear war, which means the press can virtually fill in the blank after “Pentagon Plans …” and be more or less correct.
Not that the press requires much.
Just one new tidbit of information per day out of the Pentagon is usually enough to satisfy most correspondents for the television networks and the daily papers, which set the news agenda for the rest of the press. The trouble occurs on days when there really is nothing new in the war, and the Pentagon spinmeisters haven’t mustered the imagination to produce a credible new theme of the day. That’s when two things are apt to happen: The press gets the day’s news from the Other Side, and it begins to “interpret” the same old humdrum news in ways that produce stories that sound new and different.
The most tangible form of news from the other side is the inevitable cavalcade of “collateral damage” claims. The Taliban has been clumsier than other U.S. enemies in using the American press as an outlet for its propaganda. The Serbs and Iraqis, for instance, at least allowed a limited number of American reporters to hang around once hostilities began, so they had some familiarity with the way things work. The Taliban relies mainly on Islamic press, such as the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television network, only bringing in Western reporters when there are opportunities to film some particular display of carnage — prearranged or otherwise. Pentagon officials have even suggested that, rather than cultivating Western press, the Taliban organized at least one press convoy hoping that American pilots would mistake it for a military column and bomb it.
So far, the Taliban has scored few points, at least in the Western press. Despite several errant bombs, including two that blew up Red Cross facilities, Rumsfeld has carried the day with his claims that the Taliban leaders are accomplished liars and the press should turn to the Pentagon for the truth. But as the war drags on and the methodical nature of the campaign begins to test the patience of hawks and doves alike, mistakes that kill civilians will be an ever-increasing problem — especially if there is no tangible progress to report.
During America’s last war, the 1999 Kosovo conflict, collateral damage nearly derailed the military plan. Some of the most notorious incidents in that campaign occurred just as progress in the war was stalling — NATO was stonewalling, and the press was howling for facts. Into that information vacuum tumbled snafus like the bombing of a line of refugees in Kosovo, the destruction of a bridge just as a passenger train was crossing it or the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Such foul-ups not only dominated the news for days and produced outrage among the war’s opponents, but also forced immediate restrictions on what targets NATO could bomb, thus hampering the military effort until the very end of the 78-day war.
One effective way to neutralize news from the Other Side is to supplant it with news from the Inside. In other words, let reporters get close to the action, bunk with the troops and relate the dramatic stories from the front — or whatever passes for it — that virtually tell themselves. Unless it is a dirty war, these stories are overwhelmingly positive. They tend to be sympathetic tales of dedicated troops working 18-hour days while eating gruel and living in mud. On-scene reports of actual combat are so compelling that they simply blot out lesser issues like collateral damage.
There have been remarkably few stories of that nature in this war. Rumsfeld and his military aides have largely blocked press access to troops for a variety of complicated reasons. They don’t want terrorists knowing which service members or units are conducting warfare against them. Countries U.S. troops are operating from fear that public association with the “infidel” Americans could enrage anti-Western extremists within their borders, so they keep the press away. And of course Rumsfeld doesn’t want the press blabbing operational details — at least not before he does. News executives are getting increasingly bitter about the lockout and are demanding better access. A bemused Rumsfeld has promised to take those demands under consideration.
If the other side isn’t producing any news, and there’s none coming from Inside either, then — well, I don’t want to say we’ll just make something up, but we certainly will play something up. Over the last few days, for instance, the theme has been the intensifying campaign against Taliban forces arrayed near the northern Afghanistan cities of Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif. On numerous newscasts, anchorpersons describe how U.S. forces are “pounding” these targets. On Wednesday, a CNN correspondent in the region insisted there was a “much more ferocious emphasis” on Taliban forces.
Without question, if you are one of the few Taliban soldiers getting a bomb dropped on you, it feels like you are being pounded. But vantage point is everything. “The war is ‘intensifying’ because reporters are finally getting close enough to see what’s going on,” one Pentagon spokesman told me. In fact, the proclamations about this tough new phase of the war just happen to coincide with Western cameramen capturing the first footage of a bombing raid in progress on Wednesday. The video, replayed incessantly that day and cropped for the next morning’s papers, showed a series of bombs thudding into a hillside. An entire ridgeline went aflame.
Dramatic, no doubt. But the strike probably was no more intense than a standard 15- or 20-minute artillery barrage. And even though the Pentagon may have taken a new tack by starting to carpet-bomb some frontline positions, it is still launching fewer than 10 bomber runs per day against frontlines that stretch for miles and miles. There are perhaps 60 fighter sorties per day, but those jets carry only one or two precision weapons that will do little or nothing against massed forces. Even if the bombers find the front lines, most reports indicate they are only sparsely manned, with Taliban troops hiding out in cities until some kind of opposition offensive forces them to defend positions near the front.
This is the phenomenon of the ever-intensifying war. If you look hard enough, every day will yield some scrap of information that suggests we’re really getting serious now: New and deadlier kinds of weapons, broader targets, ground forces going into action. Expectations will rise accordingly — surely now the war will be heading toward climax. Disappointment becomes inevitable. If we’re ramping up and they’re still holding out, the war must be going badly. Time to change our strategy.
As the Kosovo war showed, though, a war that appears intense at the outset can quickly fizzle out. The day after the war’s first strikes, for instance, the Washington Post declared that “a broad and punishing wave of air attacks” was underway. The Wall Street Journal trumpeted “massive airstrikes intended to halt ethnic violence in Kosovo.” A week later, the Washington Post still believed the bombing campaign was “relentless.”
In fact, we now know that during the entire first month of the war, NATO was so restricted in what it was allowed to bomb that there was near revolt among some senior military commanders. Top generals and politicians genuinely believed that a few days of pin-prick bombing would compel Slobodan Milosevic to pull his tormentors out of Kosovo. They barely had a plan for what to do if Milosevic didn’t cave.
Still, the press thundered onward. By Week 2, the theme was how the deployment of Apache attack helicopters and A-10 attack jets would surely pummel the helpless Serbs on the ground. The Apaches never even entered Serbian airspace; the A-10s flew a few missions, but not the low-altitude tank-chewing sorties the press had led the public to believe would be so decisive. Such frustrated expectations all around eventually produced withering criticism. Only the miracle of a casualty-free war vindicated the military strategists.
Is Operation Enduring Freedom headed for failure? If you believe the war has entered an intense new phase, then the likely conclusion is yes. After all, the bunker busters haven’t killed Osama bin Laden or any of the Taliban leaders, and the B-52 raids haven’t produced dazed, terrified foes desperate to surrender. The press is right to push for all the information it can get, and to highlight changes in the texture of the story when they appear. But in the breathless rush to get out today’s story — any story — skepticism gets deferred. Then it becomes its own story down the road, when the generals aren’t meeting the expectations the press has established for them.
Rumsfeld et al. seem to understand at least this much: Lowering expectations early on could produce better-looking results later. They promised a long war, not a short one. And they told us there would be casualties. What they didn’t anticipate is how the media’s incessant demand for information — and their own need to meet that demand — would change expectations and the measures for success.
“How the press handles this new conflict will also contribute to the success of it,” Rumsfeld told reporters two weeks into the war. It could also lead it to failure.
As the United States struggles to respond effectively to the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Bush administration official widely reported to be missing in action this year — Secretary of State Colin Powell — has so far turned out to be its strongest voice.
Powell was ridiculed as the missing man by Time magazine in its Sept. 10 issue — the day before the terrorist attacks that killed as many as 7,000 and transformed international affairs. “Where have you gone Colin Powell?” read the taunt on the cover. The article called Powell the “odd man out,” and said that a slew of conservatives — from Richard Perle to Paul Wolfowitz in the Defense Department, to John Bolton at State — had neutralized the liberal, diplomacy-oriented secretary of state.
It’s tempting to ask where those hawkish voices have gone, now that Powell has become the reassuring, firm voice of reason to a frightened, angry nation.
But Powell’s apparent ascendancy shouldn’t be overstated. Just as rumors of his diminished role before Sept. 11 were somewhat exaggerated, the extent to which he’s won the internal war over how the U.S. responds to Osama bin Laden may also turn out to be temporary. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld left Wednesday for a diplomatic tour of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt and Uzbekistan — nations vital for deployment of U.S. forces against Afghanistan’s terrorist camps directed by bin Laden — it was hard to know whether Rumsfeld’s departure meant that Powell is too important to U.S. planning to leave Washington, or that the hawkish defense secretary is firmly in charge of an impending military offensive.
Still, it’s clear that for the last three weeks, Powell has carried the day. Although he was quick to call the attacks “war,” he also warned the American public almost immediately that what was needed was not a series of explosive military attacks on Afghanistan or other nations suspected of harboring bin Laden, but a broad military and diplomatic coalition that would isolate those who supported terrorists.
In those same early days after the attacks, Rumsfeld and his hard-line deputy Paul Wolfowitz argued for a more forceful approach — including swift military action against Afghanistan and even Iraq as sponsors of terrorism.
“The assumptions that went into military plans on Sept. 10th just don’t apply any more, and one has to think about, if necessary, larger forces,” Wolfowitz told PBS Sept. 14. “One has to think about accepting casualties. One has to think about sustained campaigns. One has to think about broad possibilities.”
And on Sept. 16, Rumsfeld himself said in a television interview, “The reality is that a terrorist can attack at any time in any place using any technique, and it is physically impossible for a free people to try to defend in every place at every time against every technique. Now, what does that mean? It means that the president is exactly right, that we have to take this battle, this war to the terrorists, where they are. And the best defense is an effective offense, in this case. And that means they have to be rooted out.”
Other hawkish Rumsfeld allies denigrated Powell’s diplomatic approach. “It’s wonderful to have the support of our friends and allies but our foremost consideration has to be to protect this country and not take a vote among others as to how we should do it,” ultra-hawk Richard Perle, who directs the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, said in the days after the attack. But Powell held firm. “The kinds of things that will probably be most successful in the campaign against terrorism are intelligence-sharing, controlling people going across our borders, financial transactions,” he told NPR Sept. 27. “You can’t do this, America alone. You need coalitions.”
Now Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz seem to be reading from the same script. Leaving a NATO meeting Sept. 28, Wolfowitz sounded much less aggressive than he had at first. The NATO allies “appreciated that we don’t believe there’s a single magic bullet, that we don’t believe it’s primarily military, and that their support is very important for maintaining the long-term resolve and patience that’s required here,” he said.
And on Wednesday Rumsfeld told reporters the war against bin Laden was more likely to rely on intelligence than military might. “It’s not going to be a cruise missile or a bomber that’s going to be the determining factor,” he said. “It’s going to be a scrap of information from some person in some country that’s been repressed by a dictatorial regime … that’s going to enable us to pull this network up by its roots and end it.”
But it was Rumsfeld, and not Powell, who left Wednesday for a tour of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt and Uzbekistan. U.S. forces are already based in Saudi Arabia and British newspapers have reported the arrival of American spy planes in Oman at a British air base. Uzbekistan has agreed to allow U.S. forces to use former Soviet bases there which were once used in the failed occupation of neighboring Afghanistan from 1980 to 1990.
Bush said Rumsfeld was “the appropriate person to send” for consultations, but the decision to deploy the defense secretary, not the secretary of state, could be read two ways. It may be that Rumsfeld still holds vital sway over America’s foreign policy and is setting up the allies and forces needed to smash bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban regime, which continues to harbor him. Or it could be that Rumsfeld is doing the field work while Powell remains at the helm of policy in Washington, receiving leaders from India and Greece Tuesday, Qatar and Portugal Wednesday and from other nations as coalition remains the weapon of choice in the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks.
A senior administration official glossed over any differences between the hawks and Powell. “This administration shows it knows how to work together and to decide the right policy,” he said, because “the president says ‘do it’ and they do it.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official added: “I was not happy to see journalists write that Powell is being undercut by hawks in the administration and I’m not happy to see you now write that Powell is winning out over the hawks. The task is not just to blow up some rocks in Afghanistan. If you are to pull up the roots of terrorist networks you don’t just pull them up militarily. You’ve got to get countries to shut down financing, bank accounts. You can’t do it with guns.”
But it wasn’t long ago that the administration seemed ready to rely more heavily on guns in its response to the Sept. 11 attack. It was Powell who quickly went to work on a diplomatic response, building a worldwide coalition aimed at cutting off financial, logistic and communications links that enable terrorists to recruit, train, equip and dispatch thousands of terrorists against American and other targets.
Starting with NATO and then Pakistan — the only country still recognizing the Afghan Taliban regime that is sheltering bin Laden — Powell won the backing of key countries willing to host U.S. forces and join an anti-terrorism coalition.
And his success does seem to have him riding higher in Washington. Rumors of his struggles within the administration, in its early months, were not entirely exaggerated. Earlier this year he was humiliated when just one day after he said the United States would continue talks with North Korea initiated by the Clinton administration, he had to reverse course when Bush gave in to hawks and ordered a cutoff of all talks pending a review. (Later the talks were approved, but the peace process has been seriously set back.) Powell also faced criticism over being soft on China back in April, when a U.S. surveillance plane was downed there, although the State Department was ultimately successful in getting the crew returned safely.
He also lost his battle to allow Iraq greater access to civilian goods while tightening sanctions on access to weapons — a move hotly opposed by hawks on Capitol Hill and eventually scotched by Russia and China in the United Nations. And the secretary of state was overruled when he tried to soft-pedal missile defense plans in Europe — Defense Department officials simply told the allies they had no choice but to accept the American plan.
Certainly Powell continues to have his hawkish critics, who still don’t forgive him for his restraint during the Gulf War, when, their line goes, the U.S. had an opportunity to go after Saddam Hussein but did not, largely due to Powell’s caution. The so-called Powell Doctrine on when to use military force — as a last resort, and only when U.S. or allies’ vital interests are at stake, after clear military and political objectives have been defined, and the mission has the support of the American people and Congress — has come in for new attack in the last three weeks.
“Ten Years On, Powell Gets it Wrong Again,” was a headline for an op-ed by Mark Steyn in the London Sunday Telegraph Sept. 30 that typified this line. “Ten years ago Powell was the only guy in the inner circle who didn’t want to fight the Gulf War,” wrote Steyn.
Conservative William Kristol, former advisor to Vice President Dan Quayle and now editor of the Weekly Standard, complained in the Washington Post Sept. 25 that all major political figures supported President Bush in his response to the terror attacks, “except for his secretary of state. Colin Powell revised or modified many of his boss’s remarks.”
After Bush told the armed forces and the American people to “be ready” for war, Mr. Powell said “let’s not assume there will be a large scale war,” Kristol wrote. Powell also went too far, according to Kristol, when he said the overthrow of the Taliban was not a U.S. goal.
“Eleven years ago then-President bush overrode Powell’s resistance to fighting Saddam. Bush was vindicated in doing so. Will the current President Bush follow Powell’s lead? Or will Bush lead and demand that Powell follow?” Kristol wrote.
But Rumsfeld and Powell have been careful not to contradict each other in public. And in fact their approaches may not be contradictory in private, at this point. Although apparently Powell’s arguments for restraint have been heard by Bush, it’s also true that the nature of the U.S. enemy — hidden in caves in a remote and hostile land — is forcing both the hawks and the diplomats to reach some common conclusions.
Above all, the religious justifications for the attacks used by bin Laden and Islamic extremists threaten to turn any U.S. response into a conflict between the West and Islam. The entire Bush administration — already well versed on the delicacy of winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world, thanks to the Gulf War — fairly well understands the need not to fall into a trap set by bin Laden.
Powell’s approach has been to shore up commitments by Muslim countries and to allow each of them to contribute whatever they can to the effort without setting off domestic instability. The key to winning the war on terrorism may lie in supporting moderate elements inside a slew of countries from Pakistan to Egypt. Powell’s work in that direction has become the national agenda, even as Rumsfeld dispatches thousands of troops, planes and ships to prepare to strike once the diplomatic work is complete.
And there may well still be differences between them. Rumsfeld has warned that the U.S. response would not be toned down to accommodate any fainthearted members of a coalition. “In this war, the mission will define the coalition — not the other way around,” he warned in a briefing last week.
As the budget picture worsens and President Bush is forced to choose between raiding the Social Security “lockbox” and cutting popular spending programs if he wants to keep the Social Security surplus intact, one of his biggest priorities seems untouchable: his pricey and controversial national missile defense (NMD) plan. The Pentagon asked Congress to appropriate $8.3 billion this year for the plan — an increase of nearly $3 billion over the money earmarked for missile defense in this year’s budget — and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon needs “every penny.”
“If you take $1.3 billion out of some portion of it, it’s big,” Rumsfeld told the Democratically-controlled subcommittee just before it cut the missile defense funding to $7 billion. “As a percentage, it’s enormous, it’s very harmful. It moves everything to the right, it delays things, it causes a change in the program that has been put together.”
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Rumsfeld was even more vehement in his defense of the missile plan. “I must say, I have trouble with the idea that defending the people of the United States and our deployed forces overseas and our friends and allies from ballistic missiles, I have trouble understanding why that’s a bad idea,” Rumsfeld said. “There is a hard core of people who, for whatever reason, are determined to kill missile defense. And I just don’t believe that vulnerability of the American people to ballistic missiles is a rational policy. I don’t think it is.”
Is the Bush administration’s passionate commitment to a national missile defense plan on a potential collision course with the economic downturn? Only if Bush decides that reining in deficit spending is more important than jump-starting the economy. That was once Republican orthodoxy (although Reagan paid only lip service to it as he ran up vast deficits), but today, everybody seems to be a Keynesian. A growing chorus of conservatives think Bush can have it both ways — that building his cherished missile defense system will also pump up the economy. Among those is New York Times columnist William Safire, who argued that a boost in the defense budget is the perfect remedy to the slouching American economy.
“When happy days are here, government should surely slow the growth of spending; when harder times are on the way, the feds should spend more and tax less,” Safire wrote in a Monday column. “My plan: Increase federal spending on education and missile defense.”
But according to William Hartung, senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, the missile program may not stimulate the economy at all. In fact, Hartung claims that the missile defense project may actually wind up costing jobs instead of creating new ones. He points out that about 70 percent of the Pentagon’s proposed $8.3 billion missile defense budget will go to just four companies, and not create many new jobs in the process. And he argues that other military programs, which may have to be cut to pay for NMD, actually spread the pork wider.
“The bulk of the money will go to Boeing, Lockheed, Ratheon and TRW. They’ve been getting about two-thirds of the missile defense money in the last 2-4 years,” Hartung says. “If they start building stuff, which is still a few years off, they’ll spread out a little more. But even then, it’s not likely to be as big of a broad-based pork barrel program as other military systems. They’re just not building that much hardware.”
Hartung says that about 80 percent of the money earmarked for NMD research and development will be spent in Southern California, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Huntsville, Ala., by those four companies. Georgia, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania may all lose defense contracts if missile defense is passed at the expense of other defense projects.
And with finite funds in the budget, and a dwindling budget surplus, Hartung thinks that’s likely. “They’re probably going to cut something if they do decide to fund missile defense entirely,” he said. “They may go after some of the fighter programs. The F-22 is built in Georgia and Texas. The new F-18 is in Missouri and Southern California. If they wanted to be political about it, they could go after the F-18 as opposed to fighting their own people in [GOP-favoring] Georgia and Texas. At first, Rumsfeld was willing to try to cut in ways that would hurt a number of different people in different regions, sort of share the pain. But the politics crept back into the process.”
Hartung says there is a long list of potential losers if American defense spending is reorganized. “Going ahead with the space-based system means they’ll probably cut back on armored vehicles. That means United Defense — which has plants in Pennsylvania, California, Oklahoma — would probably take a hit. So would General Dynamics, which has tank stuff in Michigan and Ohio.”
Even companies that stand to gain from the missile defense spending might suffer. “The McDonnell-Douglas division of Boeing would lose out if they cut the F-18s. Lockheed Martin and Boeing would take a hit on the F-22, but they would be getting a lot of missile defense programs. If it came down to losing production contracts in exchange for R&D in the short term, they’d rather keep their current programs.”
Spokesmen for Boeing and Lockheed Martin did not return calls seeking comment.
Democrats have seized on Hartung’s criticism. Last week, in a speech before the Center for Strategic & International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee and a hawk on defense spending, criticized the administration for its obsession with an untested, exorbitantly expensive missile defense plan. (Just what the final price tag on NMD will be is unknown; estimates range from $200 to $300 billion or more.)
“To be sure, a limited missile defense system is part of such an effort. But the obsession with national missile defense by some as a Maginot line in the sky has become theological,” Skelton said. “A missile defense system should be treated as a weapons system like any other and it should be only one part of the U.S. approach to protecting its citizens. … Comprehensive homeland security, not merely the one element represented by missile defense, should be the focus of our efforts.”
That criticism was echoed Monday by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a speech to the National Press Club. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times before the speech, Biden pointed out that the money tagged for the untested missile defense system could be used to build a new generation of fighter planes and attack helicopters to replace the aging U.S. fleet.
“We could provide our Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines virtually everything they need in the immediate future for about $385 billion — less than what a missile defense system would cost,” Biden said. (The administration’s total defense budget request for next year is $329 billion, a $33 billion increase over this year’s defense spending.) Not only that, building new fighters, helicopters and other military hardware would mean new jobs, he added.
Biden called the president’s missile defense plan “nonsense” and a “cold-war relic” and warned that it might kick-start a new, unnecessary arms race, trashing the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty along the way. “Before we go raising the starting gun that will begin a new arms race in the world — before we dip into the Social Security trust fund to satisfy the administration’s almost theological allegiance to missile defense at the expense of more earth-bound military and international treaties — before we watch China build up its nuclear arsenal and see an arms race in Asia and in the subcontinent — before we squander the best opportunity we’ve had in a generation to modernize our conventional and nuclear forces, let’s look at the real threats we face home and abroad,” Biden said. “Let’s reengage and rethink and meet our obligations with a strength and resolve that befits our place in this new world.”
Biden has scheduled a number of hearings to assess the range of threats to American security, including biological and chemical threats, and so-called loose nukes — nuclear weapons that may fall into the hands of hostile nations other than the known nuclear powers. Money to battle these more immediate threats would be a better investment, he said.
“This is something the senator has been saying for a while,” said Lynne Weil, spokeswoman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Now that he’s the chairman of the committee, this is an opportunity to roll out his opinions. He’s basically leveraging his position as chairman of the committee, and using it as a platform to push through some of his ideas.”
Not all Democrats are critical of Bush’s missile plan. Sen. Daniel Inouye, chairman of the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has called for complete funding of the $8.3 billion Rumsfeld and Co. have requested for missile defense.
But during his rounds of the Sunday talk shows, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. said Inouye was in the minority among Democrats. Like Biden, Daschle said he was concerned that full funding could lead to testing that would violate the 30-year old Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty the United States signed with the Soviet Union — a treaty Bush has said he wants to scrap.
“I don’t think that we need all the resources that the president has requested for national missile defense. A lot of it has to do with deployment,” Daschle said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We’re not supportive of deployment. We’ll continue to fund research, but we aren’t willing to violate the ABM Treaty. We’re not willing to really sever ties with our allies on this issue. I think we’ve got to work through it very carefully, and some of it has budgetary ramifications. So, we’re going to take a look. We’ve actually cut the NMD budget right now, and I think it was the right thing to do.”
Democrats also point to an obvious irony in the administration’s attitude toward science. While Team Bush has demanded rock-solid scientific evidence before taking steps to curb global warming (evidence that most experts say has been present for years), they have been far more cavalier about dumping billions into a missile defense system that many scientists and defense experts say may never work.
Hartung says a missile defense system may prove even less effective if countries like China update their nuclear arsenal, as they have threatened to do if the U.S. goes ahead with building a missile defense system.
“There is really no guarantee that this can work,” he said. “There are all sorts of reasons why it may not. They haven’t solved the problem with how to deal with decoys — the lasers lose force as they go through the atmosphere. There are just so many advantages to the attacker, it’s hard to see how they could come up with anything that had more than a marginal effect on mutually assured destruction. The argument that this will take the nuclear threat against the United States out of the picture really doesn’t match what the technology is able to do. If they were willing to go for deep cuts in nuclear forces then some sort of defensive system might be a useful backup, but not much more than that.”
In testimony at their Senate confirmation hearings, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld indicated that the new Bush administration would spend billions on what is already the most expensive research project in the history of the United States government — an antimissile defense system.
President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative,” or “Star Wars,” has cost the United States $60 billion since the mid-1980s. Congress most recently financed SDI in 1999, when, quietly and with bipartisan support, $6.6 billion was doled out for further development of national missile defense. Yet it hasn’t always been clear where the money goes, what has been developed so far or whether any of these systems will ever work.
According to Powell, national missile defense, like the Internet, is essential to America’s future. Rumsfeld, who was secretary of defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Ford, explained in his testimony that defense shields “work without being fired” because “they alter behavior.” Both men also have declared the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 to be virtually obsolete.
Frances FitzGerald, historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Fire in the Lake,” offered an in-depth account of SDI under the Reagan administration with her acclaimed work “Way Out There in the Blue.” Heralded for its clear and elegant style, FitzGerald’s book unveils the daunting complexities surrounding missile defense, from its bizarre scientific origins to Reagan’s thorny personal motivations to its role in the arms race.
Salon spoke with FitzGerald about what lies ahead for missile defense.
Now that the Republicans are in office, missile defense is a hot issue. But it seems as if “Star Wars” and all its progeny are still shrouded in mystery.
No one ever knew quite what it was. It was a bunch of research programs. Reagan promised it would protect us, like a roof over our heads. It always had to do with weapons in space.
How did it change with the Bush and Clinton administrations?
There have been many “sons of Star Wars.” They’re mostly just ideas too. The first Bush administration supported “Brilliant Pebbles,” the notion that these things rattling around in space would intercept missiles.
Clinton, though, was developing a ground-based system. They built various sorts of prototypes. Missile defense isn’t one thing — it’s radars and all kinds of stuff. It’s not a scientific problem — having it all work at once is the problem. And Clinton’s system has various problems; two out of three tests have failed. A big issue is whether or not the system can deal with decoys.
What was the Clinton administration’s rationale for it?
Rationales change all the time. The Clinton administration rationale was to protect us from “rogue states” — which did not mean Russia or China. It meant Iraq, Iran and Korea. Then, they decided that they weren’t “rogue states” and Madeleine Albright started talking about “states of concern.”
But all of those countries have unique considerations.
The problem with China is that, essentially, it has ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles], but it only has 20 of them. We kept trying to reassure them that our system wasn’t aimed at them. But if it actually worked, it might suppress their deterrent force. Therefore, if you build anything bigger, it might definitely affect them. So what choice do they have but to build up more ICBMs of their own?
With Russia it’s another problem. They have something like 6,000 strategic warheads. They want to bring strategic warheads below 2,000, but they’re not so keen on doing that if we’re building up our defense.
What Putin has been pushing for — “boost-phase” — is the notion that you have short-range missile defense. You put it offshore or in a neighboring country; you put it on a ship near Iraq, for example. And you have the ability to shoot down ICBMs on the way up, as opposed to on the way down. The idea would be that nobody gets total, country-wide defense. Instead, you get defense from states that appear dangerous. So it wouldn’t actually threaten the Russian deterrent system.
Can North Korea’s missiles reach us?
No.
How do you think the new Bush administration will move on missile defense?
They have all saluted. You can’t have a Republican administration these days that wouldn’t be all for it. They may start to tell us that they are developing space weaponry, but that it will take a long time. The right really wants space. And the potential for attack as well. You can use a weapon either way …
It could be that the administration will say that they’re doing a terrific thing and that it’s much better than what the Democrats did. They’re just going to have to make a decision about what it is they actually want.
And Colin Powell?
You can’t imagine that Colin Powell’s foolish enough to think that this thing works, but he’s been toeing the same general line ever since 1987. Powell supported the broad interpretation of the ABM Treaty in the first place. He saluted it then and he has saluted it now.
But the person to look at isn’t Powell, it’s Rumsfeld. Colin Powell will have to deal with the diplomatic fallout, but the operative is Rumsfeld. He’s a very powerful secretary of defense.
His [Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States] reported in 1998, if I’m correct, that these small countries might be able to develop international-range ballistic missiles in a small-enough time frame. That got everybody upset. This was used by the Republicans to push [missile defense funding] through Congress.
How do you think the Democrats will act under the Bush administration?
Senator Carl Levin from Michigan, the [now former] chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is serious about protecting the ABM Treaty. Senator Joseph Biden from Delaware is serious about it.
But it’s a good question what the Democrats will do. They all signed onto it in 1998 when the impeachment trial was going on in the Senate. They were quiet about it then. But it won’t be easy to take a stance in this administration.
Do you think they will fight it at all?
They may now that there’s a Republican president. It’s going to be difficult. [The Bush administration] hasn’t told us what system they want. If they start developing something other than what was tested last year, it will take a long time.
Any sort of rational or logical missile defense strategy floating around out there?
Well, there are always two questions. First, can you develop it? Second, if you could, would it enhance our national security?
… Or would it threaten it even more?
Yes.
How do you feel about deterrence as a defense strategy in general?
It seems to me that deterrence has worked for a long time and I don’t know why it shouldn’t continue to work. Any country that attacked us would be a pile of ruins the next day.
We have total faith in it at the moment.
Why do people support this even though they know it hasn’t worked and maybe never will?
It’s a very political weapon.
