The American art of war

What shape will the US war against terrorism take? Galal Nassar assesses the US arsenal -- including its ideological weaponry
The outcome of any international military confrontation is contingent upon the relative political, economic and military capacities of the conflicting parties and the degree of outside support they receive. However, when the US enters the picture, it's a different ball game. Other standards and strategies come into play because the nature of the enemy and the types of weapons that are used to terminate it are subject to calculations that are uniquely American.
The history of international conflict has generally revolved around the defence of national boundaries and entailed the engagement of conventional armies and military formations. With the onset of the Cold War, there were numerous proxy wars such as the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, the civil war in Angola and the US-backed guerrilla war of attrition against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. In the course of these proxy wars, US strategy, the definition of the enemy and the type of weaponry to be brought to bear underwent profound changes.
Of central importance in this confrontation was the growth of an immense media machine through which successive US administrations succeeded in manufacturing an enemy in the form of a demonic symbol as the focus for a set of policies and values they claimed they wanted to promote. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989, international relations underwent a profound transformation as it became clear that nuclear power had not been decisive in determining the outcome of the Cold War. Instead, it was the US propaganda arsenal of democracy, human rights and the threat of dictatorship and totalitarianism to the Western oases of democracy that proved most effective in the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
The 1991 Gulf War brought into effect the largest international alliance since World War II. It was directed against Saddam Hussein and his bid to secure control over petroleum resources in the Gulf. Just as the US media portrayed Hussein as a vital ally during the Iraq-Iran war, so, too, did it succeed in reinventing him as an enemy against which to rally allied energies in the Gulf War. A similar process came into play with many other figures including Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic, and today, Osama Bin Laden.
The US needed the Milosevic peril in the Balkans to prove that even in the absence of the Soviet threat, the US was still vital to European security and that EU security arrangements that sought to minimise US hegemony would not protect their interests. Thus, when crisis in the Balkans began to flare up, the US maintained its distance until Europe was drawn into the quagmire and was forced to appeal to the US "Superman" for rescue. I personally saw the flyers that US planes dropped over Yugoslavia and Kosovo that depicted a red, white and blue Superman saving the children of Yugoslavia from the evil Milosevic and his cohorts.
Prior to the Balkans, the US would present its military actions garbed in humanitarian values, which the enemy implicitly threatened, and sealed these with the stamp "operation," rather than war. In Somalia, "Restore Hope" was an operation that was cloaked in humanitarian values that actually aimed to secure US control over Somalia's promising petroleum prospects. There, the demonisation of General Farah Aidid worked in tandem with the preparations for an American airborne landing, covered live for international consumption by 600 journalists and television cameras.
But, perhaps the US invasion of Haiti, code-named "Operation Uphold Democracy," best epitomises the US's method of packaging its goals. When Bill Clinton declared that the operation aspired to champion the principles of democracy and restore an elected government to power, he in fact was promoting a strategy of interventionism whereby humanitarian propaganda became the magic wand for extending US hegemony over far-flung regions of the world.
However, US credibility in inventing moral enemies would invariably come up against two issues: the Kurds and the Palestinians. Perhaps the Kurdish issue furnishes the most blatant example of the American double standard, for while the administration of George Bush senior vaunted itself as the protector of the Kurds in northern Iraq in 1991, it and successive US administrations turned a blind eye to the virtually annual military campaigns and clamp-downs waged by its ally, Turkey, against Kurds inside Turkey. This wanton disregard continued in spite of the fact that the Turkish campaigns, too, caused hundreds of deaths and rendered thousands homeless.
With the new millennium, the US media machine had developed a new enemy that loomed fully-formed to threaten Western interests and values: Islam and Islamic fundamentalist groups. The media machine has been, in large part, effective in fostering the impression that Islam and terrorism are synonymous -- a phenomenon encouraged by recent theories on international political and cultural relations such as Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilisations." The impact of the media and academia's output is that all Muslims and Arabs are widely viewed in the West as a threat.
Moreover, no distinction is drawn between the Phillipines-based Abu Sayyaf gangs that kidnap to extort money and the Lebanese Hizbullah and Palestinian resistance groups fighting Israeli occupation. Nor has there been any reflection on the fact that members of radical Islamic groups, such as the Egyptian Jihad and Gama'a Islamiya, not to mention the network that evolved into Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida [The Base], were recipients of US protection, and, sometimes, active US support.
Indeed, the CIA helped to found, train and arm the Taliban to oust the Soviet and Iranian supported government in Afghanistan and to secure control over the petroleum resources of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea. That strategy clearly backfired, and now the spectre of Islam has been elevated to the US's primary weapon for extending its political and military hegemony.
Central Asia, long a challenge to US geostrategic planning, has been increasingly advanced in US geopolitical thinking as a key to global domination, particularly in light of the recent Iranian-Russian-Chinese rapprochement and the growing international pressures for a multi-polar order. A pro-US regime at the strategic centre of that triangle would perform a function very similar to that of Israel in the Middle East.
Four years ago, the Pentagon and the CIA began to study ways of counteracting the potential threat of the radical Islamist groups it had helped to nurture should they turn against US and Israeli interests. In light of these studies, US military and intelligence agencies initiated training for a new form of warfare, targeting the bases and subsidiary groupings of these organisations. Reminiscent of Ariel Sharon's multi-pronged assault against the Palestinian resistance, the US strategy entails strikes against the organisational infrastructure of terrorist networks, assassination campaigns and sustained blockades. It is not unlikely that one reason the US has been so indulgent with Sharon's belligerency was that it served as a field test for its own future strategy.
Regardless of whether or not an Arab or Muslim group could have been capable of perpetrating the suicide attacks in New York and Washington, international public opinion must contend with the US's determination to exact retribution. The world has been presented with two sides in the forthcoming battle: the nation that emerged victorious from the previous century as the world's sole superpower and that mysterious, formless foe called terrorism.
Code-named "Infinite Justice," scenarios for waging the forthcoming "operation" range from roving missile bombardment and intensive air strikes to commando operations and land assaults. The scenarios, however, are all plagued by a gross disparity between political objectives and the prospect of military success. The US's vastly superior military power would have little difficulty in inflicting a crushing defeat on Afghanistan, but this would do little to accomplish the dual goal of ending terrorism and restoring the US's international prestige.
Although Pentagon officials say that US forces are equipped and poised to land special forces and bombard specific targets with Cruise missiles, such operations require first that the targets be pinpointed on the basis of precise intelligence. Towards studying the theatre of operations, a US reconnaissance team went to Pakistan. Their task is not only complicated by the fact that Afghanistan is on the defensive, but also because following decades of civil war in an already very underdeveloped country with no resources, there are no vital targets worth hitting. In addition, satellite reconnaissance, the main function of which is to monitor troop and heavy weapons movements, will be of no avail to the US since the Afghanis rely primarily on easily concealable light weaponry. Consider, alone, that it took days before US satellites could ascertain whether the Taliban had indeed demolished the ancient 70-metre-high Buddhas. Finally, apart from the limited active support they gave Afghan resistance forces in their war against the Soviet Union, US forces have had little training for manoeuvering in Afghanistan's notoriously rugged and mountainous terrain.
But, intelligence gathering had already been a problem for US security forces well before the events of 11 September. Several months ago, in the UK, I had occasion to meet a former CIA officer who told me that the CIA and the FBI had lost their ability to penetrate Middle Eastern and Central Asian societies, a capacity they had in abundance during the Cold War era. Gone, he said, are covert operators who could assimilate into these societies so convincingly that they could furnish precise readings of shifts in public mood and even, if necessary, infiltrate the ranks of underground organisations. Now, US intelligence agencies have to content themselves with officers attached to diplomatic corps, cut off from the societies in which they are stationed.
The US possesses 12 aircraft carriers, each capable of carrying approximately 170 F-14s and F-18s, as well as numbers of transport and assistance planes and E2C reconnaissance planes. The sixth fleet is currently in the Mediterranean, the fifth in the Gulf, the seventh in the Pacific. All are engaged in functions too vital for them to be redirected towards the theatre of operations for retribution. On the other hand, the US has equipped the George Washington, a modern, nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and the John Kennedy, a conventional carrier, and directed them to the Indian Ocean, south of Karachi, to be as close as possible to the forthcoming theatre of operations.
Afghanistan is a landlocked country, bordered to the north by the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan; to the east, by China; the south, by Pakistan and the west by Iran. It is a very difficult country to reach, all the more so since Iran and China, albeit for different reasons, refuse to grant US forces access to their airspace. And, although the Central Asian countries bordering Afghanistan to the north have declared that they will assist US forces, invasion from that direction is still operationally complicated, as the Russians, themselves once mired in the Afghani morass, are in the best position to testify. Pakistan, therefore, appears the only truly viable front. Yet, although it offers US aircraft the advantage of having to cross only some 600 kilometres of Pakistani airspace, B52 bombers, for example, will prove of little advantage due to the lack of strategic targets, in the customary sense, in Afghanistan and because they do not operate at high altitudes.
Simultaneously, while Western reports have hinted that recourse to America's enormous stockpiles of nuclear arms or other weapons of mass destruction might bring a rapid conclusion to any engagement with minimal US losses, I do not believe this option is open. Too many countries in the region would vehemently object, if only because the prospect of fall-out, and the precedent might encourage other members of the nuclear club, such as Russia, India and Israel to contemplate the nuclear option against Chechnya, Kashmir and Palestine.
In view of such factors as terrain and the tenacity of Afghan fighters, US strategists will want to avoid a drawn out engagement of US ground forces, and will, therefore, try to limit their offensive to aerial and missile bombardment and, perhaps, some airborne commando missions with specific and quickly achievable objectives. The US is well aware that, in spite of their vastly superior forces, two great powers -- Great Britain in the late 19th century and the Soviet Union in the late 20th century -- met humiliating defeat in Afghanistan.
Following any strike against Afghanistan, the greatest source of anxiety, at present, is that the US is not the only power that seeks to control the Caspian and Central Asia. China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Iran and others also believe that these areas lie within the sphere of their national security interests. Any military action, therefore, could trigger an endless range of unpredictable scenarios that, in turn, could precipitate a chain reaction that would propel the world towards a major war. Indicative of such prospects are Pakistan's demand that neither Israel nor India take part in an allied operation that traverses its airspace because it perceives that both pose a threat to its nuclear installations. China, for its part, will object to any prolonged US presence in Afghanistan, as undoubtedly will Iran and Russia, and may, therefore, be expected to back any anti-American resistance in that country in order to speed the departure of US forces. In view of the political and military risks such scenarios would entail, the US may instead seek to install a pro-US government. But, until that alternative proves feasible all possibilities remain open.
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