On becoming Osama bin Laden's unwitting ally

Jerome Karabel

Wednesday, September 26, 2001

A WAR between the United States and broad swaths of the Islamic world was precisely what Osama bin Laden and his accomplices in terror hoped to provoke by attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But they cannot accomplish their goal without our assistance.

What they need -- and what President Bush's speech makes clear we are getting ready to deliver -- is a large-scale military assault on a Muslim country. By presenting the Taliban with a list of non-negotiable demands and effectively threatening them with death, the White House has virtually guaranteed that the United States will soon be at war with Afghanistan. And in pursuing that war, we are likely to find ourselves unwitting allies of the very forces we seek to defeat.

As the nation prepares for war, the real question before the American people is not the justness of the cause of fighting terrorism, which is a righteous one. Rather, it is whether the road on which we are embarking will accomplish our objectives.

So far, the Bush administration's case for massive military action has proved unconvincing, for its strategy rests on at least three deeply flawed assumptions.

Assumption One: That, as President Bush stated, "there will be universal approval of the actions this government takes." Though virtually every nation was horrified by the terrorist attacks, support worldwide for a military response is limited. In a little-publicized Gallup international poll on terrorism taken last week, by large majorities citizens of 34 of 37 countries, including the United Kingdom, preferred extraditing the terrorists to stand trial rather than a military attack. Apart from the United States, the only countries polled that supported military action over extradition were Israel and India. And even our closest friends are urging caution, with Javier Solana, the European Union's top foreign policy official, stating flatly that "the center of gravity in the fight against terrorism is not the military."

Assumption Two: That the United States can win a clear victory in a military conflict with Afghanistan. From the moment that the Bush administration announced that it would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them," momentum for an armed conflict with Afghanistan has been building. Though it is well within our power to destroy what is left of a country already devastated by its war with the Soviet Union and the civil war that followed, pacifying the entirety of this mountainous nation is almost certainly beyond our capacity. No country -- not the British Empire, not czarist Russia, not the Soviet Union -- has ever succeeded in establishing control over Afghanistan and subduing its people. Perhaps the United States will be the first, but a more likely scenario is that the results of a military conflict will be inconclusive and that the stunningly inhospitable Afghan landscape will permit guerrillas to inflict heavy casualties on American forces.

Assumption Three: That the United States can carry out what the White House has called a "sweeping" war against terrorism without producing unintended -- and massively counterproductive -- consequences. Under the best of circumstances, a bloody assault on Afghanistan likely to result in a large number of civilian casualties will vastly enlarge the pool of suicide bombers in the next generation; under the worst, it will destabilize precarious regimes in the region, bringing Islamic radicals to power.

Pakistan, in particular, is a prime candidate to become a Taliban-like regime. The second-most populous Islamic nation in the world, Pakistan may have been pressured by the United States into making more concessions than its fragile government can withstand; anti-U.S. demonstrations are already widespread, and a recent Gallup poll reported that only 7 percent of Pakistanis will side with America in the event that the United States launches a military attack strike against Afghanistan, compared to 63 percent who will side with Afghanistan. Should the current military regime -- which includes a considerable number of Taliban sympathizers among its senior officers and its intelligence apparatus -- topple, the United States would be faced with the world's first radical Islamic regime with nuclear weapons.

Does acknowledging the flawed character of the assumptions shaping U.S. policy mean that no military response is warranted? Not necessarily. But of the many means available to the United States, military measures are the ones most likely to enlarge the ranks of our enemies and among the least likely to accomplish our goal of dismantling terrorist cells worldwide. Any military action must be carefully targeted to those who are truly responsible, must be limited rather than sweeping, and must avoid killing large numbers of innocent people.

The emotionally unsatisfying truth is that economic, political, diplomatic, intelligence-gathering and law enforcement measures are likely to prove more effective than military ones in the new and shadowy kind of war that we now face. Secretary of State Colin Powell has recognized this, but others in the Bush administration -- notably Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and his allies -- hope to seize the opportunity provided by Sept. 11 to launch military attacks on regimes unfriendly to the United States. This course of action must be rejected, for there is no way to conduct such a campaign without the appearance of waging war on the entire Muslim world. Given past U. S. policy failures in the region -- and the Taliban regime is itself in good part a product of our actions, -- a sober recognition that the results of our policies have sometimes been the very opposite of our intentions must guide our actions.

But sobriety is hard to maintain in the face of monstrous provocation, and the march toward war seems unstoppable. Nevertheless, as we consider our response to the attack of Sept. 11, the nightmarish prospect that the legacy of our actions may be a radicalized Pakistani regime possessing 30 nuclear weapons -- each of them larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- demands that we stop to consider the very real possibility that our actions may be catastrophically counterproductive.

Jerome Karabel is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and a senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute.

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2001/09/26/ED69828.DTL