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The Real Coalition -- Yesterday's Actions Trump Colin Powell's Talk
by Jonathan Foreman
The New York Post, October 8, 2001

Yesterday's cruise missile and bomber attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda assets in Afghanistan come as a somber relief to those who feared that, far from reacting with precipitate violence to the Sept. 11 massacres in New York and Washington, the United States would do little or nothing in response except to build a bogus anti-terrorist "coalition" - that grotesquely included terrorist sponsors like Syria.

While we had also threatened various international Islamist terrorist groups (not including Hezbollah or Hamas) with financial sanctions, cyberwarfare and even legal indictments, it looked all too likely that America and her real allies would avoid any action that might be remotely affective until roused by a second devastating attack emboldened or even made inevitable by our apparent impotence.

So it is good news indeed that we are now engaged in a campaign that indicates proper resolve both to punish those behind the Sept. 11 slaughter and to deter future outrages. Yet it remains essential that we avoid the temptation to strike back only in ways that fail to genuinely hurt our enemies or which convey American fearfulness.

Yes, our enemies in Afghanistan will certainly be inconvenienced by the confirmed loss of electrical power in Kabul and Kandahar and the possible destruction of aircraft, military command centers and perhaps even some of Osama bin Laden's desert camps.

But there is nothing in the history of the Taliban or the "Arab Afghans" of al-Qaeda to indicate that either will be especially intimidated by such a show of high tech force. Certainly the 1998 cruise-missile raids on bin Laden's Afghan bases - though admittedly carried out on a smaller scale than the present campaign - had no such effect.

The fact is that airstrikes alone, particularly on the kinds of target to be found in Afghanistan, will convey only our legendary modern fearfulness - unless they are quickly followed by ground operations.

Remember, Osama bin Laden has on several occasions referred to our flight from Somalia after the loss of 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu (indeed he has claimed credit for their deaths). He and his allies really believe that Americans are too cowardly, our armed forces too steeped in the Powell Doctrine of casualty avoidance at any cost, to really present much of a threat to his army of fanatics or their state sponsors.

So if we are serious about critically damaging both the Taliban and al-Qaeda - as President Bush's stirring speech yesterday certainly indicated - then we will have to bite the bullet and take the kind of risky military action that we avoided for so long.

Indeed, the most reassuring and encouraging part of the president's address was the part in which he spoke of the "broader" long-term battle, and of there being "no neutral ground" in this conflict - clearly implying that there will future campaigns against terror-sponsoring states like Iraq.

It is essential that that this message be manifested in action.

Earlier Bush statements about "ending states" that practiced or supported terrorism and using "every necessary weapon of war" to do so had been subsequently contradicted in speech and deed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has often seemed to be running a foreign policy in direct conflict with the stated goals of his own administration.

It still is not clear at this point if the onset of military operations indicates that the true intent of the Bush adminstration is closer to the views of "hawkish" realists like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

It's just possible that Secretary Powell's ambitious diplomatic agenda - which encompassed repellent overtures to states like Syria and Iran that have sponsored the murder of Americans, and the concomitant exclusion of Israel from the "coalition" - was in fact some kind of "good cop" window-dressing designed to distract from our preparations for war.

If so, it was a dangerous one that ran the risk of alienating not just Israel but new and important allies like Russia, Turkey and India. These nations take terrorism seriously - India lost 38 people in last week's Kashmir truck bombing by a Pakistan-backed group strangely unproscribed by Powell's State Department - and they are hardly likely
to do us any favors while we are flirting with states that give money, arms
and shelter to terrorists.

Happily - despite the polite thanks given out by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield and others - the mega-coalition assembled by Powell is not playing a significant role in the campaign and is unlikely to do so. Instead, we are fighting alongside our traditional British allies and are counting on the promised military support of France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Australia.

It seems that President Bush has been won over by those like Wolfowitz who see Powell's hostility to the use of American arms under almost any circumstance, as inappropriate and even dangerous in the present emergency. If so, it is just as well. Already, the perception on the part of bin Laden and others that America is a paper tiger, a flailing giant mired in its own decadence, a superpower that will not act without a go-ahead from the Saudi petro-Lords, has cost us more than we can bear.

And, while it is to be hoped that our Afghan campaign is only the beginning of a much wider effort to seek out and destroy our enemies, whether sitting in Bagdad or the Bekaa Valley, it is an unquestionable good to attack the military assets of the Taliban.

Quite apart from their symbiotic relationship with bin Laden, these fanatics, who murder women and girls for going to school, who are to Islam what the Khmer Rouge were to socialism, are as disgusting a band of brutes as have ever run an Asian society into the ground.

They deserve what's coming to them.