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In responding to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Washington must face an enemy with numerous strengths while avoiding playing into the strategy of Osama bin Laden and his backers. To achieve its goals, the United States must create several theaters of operations, including in Afghanistan, North America and throughout the world.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon paralyzed the New York financial markets for four days and shut down the air transport system completely for a similar period of time. The attacks also degraded the U.S. economy substantially, both by its direct effects on economic activity and by its impact on public confidence.
Washington has asserted, with reason, that the attacks were organized by al-Qaida, a group founded by Osama bin Laden. The United States must take into account the strengths of its formidable enemy. For their part, bin Laden’s forces and Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban have likely developed a war plan to exploit the perceived weaknesses of the United States.
Several factors point to a degree of sophistication and dedication among the attackers that is extraordinary. First, they maintained operational security while moving personnel and large sums of money intercontinentally. They clearly understood the parameters of U.S. technical and human intelligence and developed methods for evading them.
Second, the selected targets were also chosen for both symbolic value and the ability to inflict massive casualties and tremendous secondary effects. There is no reason whatever to believe the attackers did not understand the likely outcome of their operation.
Last, the operational security of the organization behind the attacks was not breached after the strikes. U.S. security and intelligence services clearly cannot be certain at this point whether other cells have been deployed in the United States and what their missions might be. If there are additional cells, they retain the advantage of tactical surprise at the moment. And even if there are no additional cells, the United States must still behave as if there are.
The goals of al-Qaida’s members are essentially simple. They see the Islamic world as occupied by non-Islamic forces, either directly or through puppet regimes. They wish to end the occupation and unite Islam. The United States, as the leading power in the world and the patron of many Islamic regimes, is the center of gravity of the anti-Islamic world. If the United States can be broken, or at least expelled from the Islamic world, other anti-Islamic powers such as Russia, China and Israel will crumble.
Al-Qaida does not expect to destroy the United States directly. It fully understands the severe limits on its resources. Rather, bin Laden’s strategy is to force the United States into a series of actions that will destabilize the governments of Washington’s Islamic partners and lead to their collapse. For instance, such an outcome could occur for Islamic countries that cooperate – due to pressure by Washington – with the U.S. campaign against terrorism.
A collapse would likely force the United States into a direct occupation of these countries, exposing U.S. forces to attacks on terrain favorable to the enemy. In such an occupation, be it in Indonesia or Morocco, bin Laden is confident his forces could generate an uprising against the United States that would force its withdrawal.
Bin Laden does not believe the United States could defeat an uprising for several reasons. First, the experience of foreign powers in suppressing mass, popular uprisings has been poor. Second, although the United States has important interests in the Islamic world, they are not on a scale to justify the expense and casualties involved in a long-term occupation. Finally, bin Laden regards the United States as morally corrupt and incapable of major exertion in the face of adversity.
Given his views, it must be assumed that bin Laden’s forces and the Taliban have developed a two-pronged war plan. First, as the United States deploys forces into Afghanistan, they will be attacked as targets of opportunity, particularly in the early stages of any buildup. This will especially include attacks in northern Afghanistan where the opposition Northern Alliance will undoubtedly host American forces.
The anti-U.S. forces will also use cross-border operations in neighboring countries hosting American troops, including Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. These operations need not be large-scale or very successful. Their goal will be to unbalance U.S. forces during the buildup and, most important, draw them deeper into Afghanistan to stop the attacks at their source.
Second, within the United States, bin Laden’s forces will continue intermittent attacks against a variety of targets with the aim of destabilizing U.S. psychology, creating doubts about the capabilities of the U.S. government, driving home the costs of the war to the American public and generating confidence in the Islamic world.
It would then be logical to assume other assault groups are already present in the United States, either awaiting activation or authorized to act on their own initiative. It is likely, given the extreme operational security maintained, that support-team members of the first assault group are unaware of the existence of these other groups and that minimal, if any, communication is taking place between them and al-Qaida.
They have a natural advantage in that U.S. forces are weakened because they cannot define the enemy’s target set with any certainty and therefore must be dissipated. Since the targets vastly outnumber the defenders, al-Qaida has created at least a temporarily superior position.
In the first thoughts on a counterattack, the United States appears to have three missions. First, prevent any further attacks by al-Qaida against American assets. Second, kill Osama bin Laden and destroy al-Qaida and all of its linked organizations on a worldwide basis. And third, punish all countries that have supported Al-Qaida, beginning with Afghanistan.
To achieve these goals, the United States must create, at least notionally, three or more separate theaters of operations, the first being in Afghanistan. The United States must define its strategic goal here. This can range from killing bin Laden, to destroying al-Qaida, to overthrowing the Taliban and occupying the major Afghan cities or pacifying the country. The issue is to match U.S. ambitions with U.S. resources and not play into bin Laden’s own strategy.
In the North American theater of operations, the strategic goals – now being called Homeland Defense – are to seal off as much of North America as possible from further penetration of enemy forces, thereby creating an arena for destroying forces already present. In many ways, this is less of a military theater than a security theater.
The intercontinental theater of operations must also be addressed. It is understood that al-Qaida has dispersed its operational assets globally. At this moment it is likely that each continent has several operational groups present. These groups must be identified and destroyed. This is also not primarily a military theater. Rather it is a theater in which intelligence and covert operations are critical and in which coalition cooperation is most essential and the most difficult to achieve.
Follow-on countries comprise the final theater of operations. The United States has already suggested that, in due course, Iraq would be added to the list of countries considered a state sponsor of the Sept. 11 attacks. Bin Laden would like to see several other countries added to that list. Indonesia is an excellent example of a country that is already destabilized, has a growing Islamic movement and is critical to U.S. interests. In other words, follow-on theaters of operation may not be areas of American choosing.
To respond effectively, the United States must remember the following: Its enemy is dispersed, has designed redundancy into its systems and seems to understand how our systems work, at least well enough to have evaded them on and prior to Sept. 11. It has shown it knows how to extract maximum advantage out of a relatively small numbers of operatives and has men who are prepared to go to their certain death.
It is also an enemy that may have structured a war plan based on a faulty assumption, which is that the Islamic world is perched on the edge of a volcano of populist Islam and that the U.S. response will trigger it.
The American perception of bin Laden is that, being isolated in Afghanistan, he is a marginal player with a sophisticated network of operatives and that his dream of an Islamic uprising is merely a fantasy. The United States also believes that an exercise of decisive force in Afghanistan, and the disabling and disruption of bin Laden’s network in the United States and the rest of the world, will delegitimize him permanently.
