The Afghan War and loss of focus in fighting jihadist terrorism

I see this article as touching on an important lesson of the Afghan War:  War in Error: Sending a general to do a sheriff’s job by Andrew Bacevich American Conservative 02/27/06 issue.

He begins his article by talking about the Damadola incident on January 13, in which a CIA drone fired a missile at a house in Waziristan province in Pakistan attempting to kill a senior Al Qaeda leader, instead killing about 18 residents.  Bacevich takes this as an example of how the US, in his view, lost its focus in the GWOT (global war on terror).

The difference between the "law enforcement" model of fighting international jihadist groups and the "military" model can be confusing, because not everyone uses the phrases consistently.  Becevich argues that it is mainly a law-enforcement issue, though military action can also have a role to play in certain circumstances.

As he puts it:

In dealing with the radicals themselves, the old adage applies: it’s kill or be killed. On this point there can be little room for debate and none for compromise. But for the killing to be purposeful, it must occur selectively: to employ violence indiscriminately is to replenish the ranks of al-Qaeda and its spawn faster than we can deplete them. That way lies not security but bankruptcy and exhaustion.

Although paying lip service to this principle, the Bush administration has violated it in practice, most egregiously in Iraq, where heavy-handed tactics fanned the flames of insurgency, but also in Afghanistan and now Pakistan. Using President Bush’s conception of war as their mandate - and at times as a de facto grant of immunity - U.S. forces charged with bringing the guilty to book have too often ended up victimizing the innocent.

The fault lies less with the soldiers who pull the triggers, aim the missiles, and drop the bombs than with the nature of war itself. Even in a high-tech age, it remains a blunt instrument. Precision weapons have not made war precise, a truth brought home yet again by the events at Damadola.

Bacevich reminds us thatto equate the challenge presented by Al Qaeda and the jihadist network, deadly as they are, with that mounted by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the Second World War, or with that of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, is a serious overestimation of the current threat:

In depicting the attack on the World Trade Center as the opening volley of a global war - a reprise of Dec. 7, 1941 - the Bush administration spun the awful events of that day in the wrong direction. The Islamists may nurse bizarre dreams of restoring the caliphate, but their existing claim to political legitimacy is marginal. Al-Qaeda is not the Wehrmacht or the Red Army; it is an international conspiracy, one that committed a singularly heinous crime. Osama bin Laden is not Hitler or Stalin  - as a historical figure he comes nowhere near their baneful significance. He is a Mafioso.

He ends by returning to the Damadolo incident and its political cost in Pakistan and the Muslim world:

But our own interests demand that we not forget those whom we have killed. At Damadola we have handed the Islamists a victory of considerable proportions, further enflaming antipathy toward the U.S. in Pakistan and among Muslims generally. And the lesson to be taken from this self-inflicted defeat is clear: four bloody years into President Bush’s war [the GWOT], the time to think anew is at hand.

What I would add with specific reference to the Afghan War that began in 2001 and continues still, that in retrospect a conventional war model was applied there that put far too much emphasis on "regime change" as a goal instead of on getting Al Qaeda and Bin Laden.  The latter could have been achieved to a far greater degree.

But at the Battle of Tora Bora in late 2001, the Bush administration relied on local allies to root out concentrated Al Qaeda forces, and they largely failed.  Philip Smucker discussed this battle in How bin Laden got away: A day-by-day account of how Osama bin Laden eluded the world's most powerful military machine Christian Science Monitor 03/04/02.  Smucker has also published a book on the Battle of Tora Bora, Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (2004).  In the Monitor article, he wrote about how the early stages of the war, allying with the Northern Alliance to seize Kabul and oust the Taliban regime, seemed to validate the hopes of those like Rumsfeld who saw an era of quick-and-easy regime change dawning:

It was a war like no other. In an evolutionary leap powered by Information Age technology, US ground soldiers were mainly employed as observers, liaisons, and spotters for air power - not as direct combatants sent to occupy a foreign land. The success of the US was dazzling, save for the fight for Tora Bora, which may have been this unconventional war's most crucial battle. For the US, Tora Bora wasn't about capturing caverns or destroying fortifications - it was about taking the world's most wanted terrorist "dead or alive."

In retrospect, it becomes clear that the battle's underlying story is of how scant intelligence, poorly chosen allies, and dubious military tactics fumbled a golden opportunity to capture bin Laden as well as many senior Al Qaeda commanders.

Moreover, as the US military conducts new strikes with its Afghan allies in nearby Paktia Province, sends special forces into Southeast and Central Asia - and prepares for a possible military plunge into Iraq - planners will need to learn the lessons of Tora Bora: Know which local leaders to trust. Know when to work with allied forces on the ground. And know when to go it alone. "Maybe the only lesson that is applicable is: whenever you use local forces, they have local agendas," says one senior Western diplomat, now looking at options for invading Iraq. "You had better know what those are so that if it is not a reasonable match - at least it is not a contradiction."

Smucker's article goes into some detail about the battle.  And while this battle doesn't pose a strict law-enforcement/military-action contrast, it does illustrate that a loss of focus on the goal of nailing the terrorists that are doing the deeds stemmed in significant part from the conception of the GWOT as a series of conventional military campaigns aimed at defeating enemy regimes.  The Bush administration has never given up its notion of terrorism as being primarily a problem of state sponsors of terrorism.

The escape of Bin Laden and so many Al Qaeda fighters meant the loss to the US of a one-time opportunity.  Since that time, Al Qaeda has become far more decentralized, and that kind of concentration of key Al Qaeda leaders and fighters is unlikely to occur again soon.  And the jihadist movement has mestastasized since then into a far broader movement than Al Qaeda and those groups directly allied with it.

And this problem was very evident in early 2002 after the experience of Tora Bora.  If so many Democrats in Congress hadn't been near-catatonic in their awe of Bush's poll numbers at that point, they could have forced a wider discussion on the Bush strategy in the GWOT and its focus on terrorism as primarily a problem of state sponsors of terrorism.