MemeStreams | The U.S. War, Five Years On

The first is that the war has succeeded far better than anyone
would have thought on Sept. 12, 2001. We remember that day clearly,
and had anyone told us that there would be no more al Qaeda attacks
in the United States for at least five years, we would have been
incredulous. Yet there have been no attacks.

The second fact is that the U.S. intervention in the Islamic world
has not achieved its operational goals. There are multiple
insurgencies under way in Iraq, and the United States does not
appear to have sufficient force or strategic intent to suppress
them. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has re-emerged as a powerful
fighting force. It is possible that the relatively small coalition
force -- a force much smaller than that fielded by the defeated
Soviets in Afghanistan -- can hold it at bay, but clearly coalition
troops cannot annihilate it.

A Strategic Response

The strategic goal of the United States on Sept. 12, 2001, was to
prevent any further attacks within the United States. Al Qaeda,
defined as the original entity that orchestrated the 1998 attacks
against the U.S. embassies in Africa, the USS Cole strike and 9/11,
has been thrown into disarray and has been unable to mount a
follow-on attack without being detected and disrupted. Other
groups, loosely linked to al Qaeda or linked only by name or shared
ideology, have carried out attacks, but none have been as daring
and successful as 9/11.

In response to 9/11, the United States resorted to direct overt and
covert intervention throughout the Islamic world. With the first
intervention, in Afghanistan, the United States and coalition
forces disrupted al Qaeda's base of operations, destabilized the
group and forced it on the defensive. Here also, the stage was set
for a long guerrilla war that the United States cannot win with the
forces available.

The invasion of Iraq, however incoherent the Bush administration's
explanation of it might be, achieved two things. First, it
convinced Saudi Arabia of the seriousness of American resolve and
caused the Saudis to become much more aggressive in cooperating
with U.S. intelligence. Second, it allowed the United States to
occupy the most strategic ground in the Middle East -- bordering on
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Iran. From here, the United
States was able to pose overt threats and to stage covert
operations against al Qaeda. Yet by invading Iraq, the United
States also set the stage for the current military crisis.

The U.S. strategy was to disrupt al Qaeda in three ways:

1. Bring the intelligence services of Muslim states -- through
persuasion, intimidation or coercion -- to provide intelligence
that was available only to them on al Qaeda's operations.

2. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq, use main force to disrupt al
Qaeda and to intimidate and coerce Islamic states. In other words,
use Operation 2 to achieve Operation 1.

3. Use the intelligence gained by these methods to conduct a range
of covert operations throughout the world, including in the United
States itself, to disrupt al Qaeda operations.

The problem, however, was this. The means used to compel
cooperation with the intelligence services in countries such as
Pakistan or Saudi Arabia involved actions that, while successful in
the immediate intent, left U.S. forces exposed on a battleground
where the correlation of forces, over time, ceased to favor the
United States. In other words, while the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq did achieve their immediate ends and did result in
effective action against al Qaeda, the outcome was to expose the
U.S. forces to exhausting counterinsurgency that they were not
configured to win.

Hindsight: The Search for an Ideal Strategy

The ideal outcome likely would have been to carry out the first and
third operations without the second. As many would argue, an
acceptable outcome would have been to carry out the Afghanistan
operation without going into Iraq. This is the crux of the debate
that has been raging since the Iraq invasion and that really began
earlier, during the Afghan war, albeit in muted form. On the one
side, the argument is that by invading Muslim countries, the United
States has played into al Qaeda's hands and actually contributed to
radicalization among Islamists -- and that by refraining from
invasion, the Americans would have reduced the threat posed by al
Qaeda. On the other side, the argument has been made that without
these two invasions -- the one for direct tactical reasons, the
other for psychological and political reasons -- al Qaeda would be
able to operate securely and without effective interference from
U.S. intelligence and that, therefore, these invasions were the
price to be paid.

There are three models, then, that have been proposed as ideals:

1. The United States should have invaded neither Afghanistan nor
Iraq, but instead should have relied entirely on covert measures
(with various levels of restraint suggested) to defeat al Qaeda.

2. The United States should have invaded Afghanistan to drive out
al Qaeda and disrupt the organization, but should not have invaded
Iraq.

3. The United States needed to invade both Iraq and Afghanistan --
the former for strategic reasons and to intimidate key players, the
latter to disrupt al Qaeda operations and its home base.

It is interesting to pause and consider that the argument is rarely
this clear-cut. Those arguing for Option 1 rarely explain how U.S.
covert operations would be carried out, and frequently oppose those
operations as well. Those who make the second argument fail to
explain how, given that the command cell of al Qaeda had escaped
Afghanistan, the United States would continue the war -- or more
precisely, where the Americans would get the intelligence to fight
a covert war. Those who argue for the third course -- the Bush
administration -- rarely explain precisely what the strategic
purpose of the war was.

In fact, 9/11 created a logic that drove the U.S. responses. Before
any covert war could be launched, al Qaeda's operational structure
had to be disrupted -- at the very least, to buy time before
another attack. Therefore, an attack in Afghanistan had to come
first (and did, commencing about a month after 9/11). Calling this
an invasion, of course, would be an error: The United States
borrowed forces from Russian and Iranian allies in Afghanistan --
and that, coupled with U.S. air power, forced the Taliban out of
the cities to disperse, regroup and restart the war later.

Covert War and a Logical Progression

The problem that the United States had with commencing covert
operations against al Qaeda was weakness in its intelligence
system. To conduct a covert war, you must have excellent
intelligence -- and U.S. intelligence on al Qaeda in the wake of
9/11 was not good enough to sustain a global covert effort. The
best intelligence on al Qaeda, simply given the nature of the group
as well as its ideology, was in the hands of the Pakistanis and the
Saudis. At the very least, Islamic governments were more likely to
have accumulated the needed intelligence than the CIA was.

The issue was in motivating these governments to cooperate with the
U.S. effort. The Saudis in particular were dubious about U.S. will,
given previous decades of behavior. Officials in Riyadh frankly
were more worried about al Qaeda's behavior within Saudi Arabia if
they collaborated with the Americans than they were about the
United States acting resolutely. Recall that the Saudis asked U.S.
forces to leave Saudi Arabia after 9/11. Changing the kingdom's
attitude was a necessary precursor to waging the covert war, just
as Afghanistan was a precursor to changing attitudes in Pakistan.

Invading Iraq was a way for the United States to demonstrate will,
while occupying strategic territory to bring further pressure
against countries like Syria. It was also a facilitator for a
global covert war. The information the Saudis started to provide
after the U.S. invasion was critical in disrupting al Qaeda
operations. And the Saudis did, in fact, pay the price for
collaboration: Al Qaeda rose up against the regime, staging its
first attack in the kingdom in May 2003, and was repressed.

In this sense, we can see a logical progression. Invading
Afghanistan disrupted al Qaeda operations there and forced
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to step up cooperation
with the United States. Invading Iraq reshaped Saudi thinking and
put the United States in a position to pressure neighboring
countries. The two moves together increased U.S. intelligence
capabilities decisively and allowed it to disrupt al Qaeda.

But it also placed U.S. forces in a strategically difficult
position. Any U.S. intervention in Asia, it has long been noted,
places the United States at a massive disadvantage. U.S. troops
inevitably will be outnumbered. They also will be fighting on an
enemy's home turf, far away from everything familiar and
comfortable. If forced into a political war, in which the enemy
combatants use the local populace to hide themselves -- and if that
populace is itself hostile to the Americans -- the results can be
extraordinarily unpleasant. Thus, the same strategy that allowed
the United States to disrupt al Qaeda also placed U.S. forces in
strategically difficult positions in two theaters of operation.

Mission Creep and Crisis

The root problem was that the United States did not crisply define
the mission in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Obviously, the immediate
purpose was to create an environment in which al Qaeda was
disrupted and the intelligence services of Muslim states felt
compelled to cooperate with the United States. But by revising the
mission upward -- from achieving these goals to providing security
to rooting out Baathism and the Taliban, then to providing security
against insurgents and even to redefining these two societies as
democracies -- the United States overreached. The issue was not
whether democracy is desirable; the issue was whether the United
States had sufficient forces at hand to reshape Iraqi and Afghan
societies in the face of resistance.

If the Americans had not at first expected resistance, they
certainly discovered that they were facing it shortly after taking
control of the major cities of each country. At that moment, they
had to make a basic decision between pursuing the United States'
own interests or defining the interest as transforming Afghan and
Iraqi society. At the moment Washington chose transformation, it
had launched into a task it could not fulfill -- or, if it could
fulfill it, would be able to do so only with enormously more force
than it placed in either country. When we consider that 300,000
Soviet troops could not subdue Afghanistan, we get a sense of how
large a force would have been needed.

The point here is this: The means used by the United States to
cripple al Qaeda also created a situation that was inherently
dangerous to the United States. Unless the mission had been parsed
precisely -- with the United States doing what it needed to do to
disrupt al Qaeda but not overreaching itself -- the outcome would
be what we see now. It is, of course, easy to say that the United
States should have intervened, achieved its goals and left each
country in chaos; it is harder to do. Nevertheless, the United
States intervened, did not leave the countries and still has chaos.
That can be said with hindsight. Acting so callously with foresight
is more difficult.

There remains the question of whether the United States could have
crippled al Qaeda without invading Iraq -- a move that still would
have left Afghanistan in its current state, but which would seem to
have been better than the situation now at hand. The answer to that
question rests on two elements. First, it is simply not clear that
the Saudis' appreciation of the situation, prior to March 2003,
would have moved them to cooperate, and extensive diplomacy over
the subject prior to the invasion had left the Americans reasonably
convinced that the Saudis could do more. Advocates of diplomacy
would have to answer the question of what more the United States
could have done on that score. Now, perhaps, over time the United
States could have developed its own intelligence sources within al
Qaeda. But time was exactly what the United States did not have.

But most important, the U.S. leadership underestimated the
consequences of an invasion. They set their goals as high as they
did because they did not believe that the Iraqis would resist --
and when resistance began, they denied that it involved anything
more than the ragtag remnants of the old regime. Their misreading
of Iraq was compounded with an extraordinary difficulty in
adjusting their thinking as reality unfolded.

But even without the administration's denial, we can see in
hindsight that the current crisis was hardwired into the strategy.
If the United States wanted to destroy al Qaeda, it had to do
things that would suck it into the current situation -- unless it
was enormously skilled and nimble, which it certainly was not. In
the end, the primary objective -- defending the homeland -- was won
at the cost of trying to achieve goals in Iraq and Afghanistan that
cannot be achieved.

In the political debate that is raging today in the United States,
our view is that both sides are quite wrong. The administration's
argument for building democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan misses the
point that the United States cannot be successful in this, because
it lacks the force to carry out the mission. The administration's
critics, who argue that Iraq particularly diverted attention from
fighting al Qaeda, fail to appreciate the complex matrix of
relationships the United States was trying to adjust with its
invasion of Iraq.

The administration is incapable of admitting that it has
overreached and led U.S. forces into an impossible position . Its
critics fail to understand the intricate connections between the
administration's various actions and the failure of al Qaeda to
strike inside the United States for five years.

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