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Toppling terror will take time, strategists say

By SCOTT CANON

Perhaps America's first counterattack in this new age of terrorism resides in the wallop of a cruise missile now aboard a ship in the Arabian Sea. It could be resting with elite ground fighters already plotting a raid into Afghanistan's countryside from somewhere in central Asia. Or it might be idling on a runway in west-central Missouri, prepared to leapfrog parts of three continents before zinging in its bombs from 30,000 feet.

Wherever the inevitable military response lurks, military strategists hold decidedly low expectations for a quick-hit victory. In fact, old definitions of victory measured by battlefield wins may not translate easily to the new war on terrorism. Still, Americans are eager for revenge. And President Bush gave them reason to think something might be in the works soon when on Friday he stood in New York's financial district and warned: "The people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon."

Blasting almost any target, given the Buck Rogers reality of the U.S. military, is not the problem. The trouble comes in settling on what targets gain America ground against terror. Putting a bull's-eye on Afghanistan may be most likely. But it barely helps. Rather, it points up scores of snags tangled in geography, politics and the need to construct maddeningly complex alliances.

What's more, the ways in which a strike could make matters worse begin with the accidental killing of children and run to breeding more terrorism rather than less. "Nothing is going to be easy," said Keith Payne, director of research for the National Institute for Public Policy. "Nothing is going to be simple."

Before picking the targets, he cautioned, the United States must settle on a goal. Do we expect to deter more terrorism by punishing the terrorists? Or do we try to deny them the ability to hurt us?

Either would be tough.

The Soviets tried the punishment tack in the Middle East in the 1980s. By making a show of harming terrorists' families, it built a reputation as a country that would exact severe retaliation. And it won them some level of security. Other times, punishment backfires. The U.S. embargo of Japan in 1941 could be seen as a provocation that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

President Bill Clinton's response to the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 has been broadly criticized as having failed to adequately scare terrorists or sufficiently wound them. He ordered missile strikes that leveled a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and fired about 70 rockets at terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Blasting the drug factory mostly confirmed America's bad-guy image in much of the region. Losses at the camps seemed to barely nick terrorist capabilities.

Middle East experts tend to agree that with the most radical Islamic fundamentalists, such as those suspected in the strikes Tuesday on New York and the Pentagon, payback is unlikely to work. A martyr cannot simply be scared off. No one home

That leaves the option of crippling the terrorists. "It's also the harder one to pull off," Payne said.

For instance, sometimes it is hard to find anyone at home. Osama bin Laden and his many lieutenants usually don't stay in one place for long. Intelligence reports trickling out of Washington suggest that satellite photographs showed an emptying of various terrorist camps in Afghanistan.

Instead, the United States could go after the Taliban, which shelters bin Laden and controls most of Afghanistan. But it does not offer the easy targets of the sort, for instance, that government buildings in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, provided in the 1999 Kosovo war. Afghanistan is more tribal than modern, and the Taliban's leadership and infrastructure are scattered across the country's rugged terrain.

Making a military mission harder yet, Afghanistan is landlocked and hard to get at. And all of its neighbors have reasons not to help America. To the west sits Iran, whose relations with the United States have warmed in recent years but not nearly enough to buddy up on a military operation. To the north are the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They remain largely dependent on Moscow, where officials Friday rejected their use as a staging ground. To the east and south is Pakistan.

On Saturday, Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, told U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin he would allow a multinational force to be based within Pakistan's borders. He also agreed to close the country's notoriously porous border with Afghanistan to allow American-led forces to use Pakistani airspace for strikes and to share intelligence.

Yet it was the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence that helped establish the Taliban. Pakistan, in fact, is itself enmeshed in an internal struggle with fundamentalist extremists certain to be angered at deal-making with the secular West.

Musharraf "may mean what he says," said Raymond Callahan, a military historian at the University of Delaware. "(But) he presides over a country that is very fragile and over things he doesn't necessarily control, including his intelligence agency."

At best, said Callahan and others, the United States might count on using Pakistan as a staging ground for only the smallest and most short-lived of commando missions. They saw little chance of using Pakistan to mount a more sustained operation to root out leaders of the Taliban or bin Laden's far-flung cronies. Even if America found a landing field on the Afghan border, it would be tackling a fight much like the one the Soviet Union tried - and lost - after dispatching more than 100,000 troops there from 1979 to 1989. "The Afghans fought the British to a standstill twice in the 19th century and the Soviets once in the 20th century," Callahan said. "They're tough on their home turf."

More than a decade of high-tech development later, American troops would have hardware the Soviets lacked. Search-and-destroy patrols could benefit from new unmanned spy planes able to intercept radio signals, and to listen for moving vehicles and even footsteps while feeding real-time pictures to distant locations. Such gadgets could be critical for manhunts of the sort that netted Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in an invasion by U.S. forces of his country in 1989.

"That sort of stuff could really help," said Tim Brown, a senior analyst for the defense consultant Globalsecurity.org. It will take more than technology. Dispatching the Army's Delta Force units typically requires intense training tailored to a specific mission. The special forces outfit is geared to charge in from helicopters or by parachute. Its troops also often count on infiltrating an area to prepare the way.

In Afghanistan, they would find a largely lawless countryside full of armed men where Westerners wouldn't blend in. "The problem is that this isn't friendly territory," Callahan said. "Our people will stand out."

Brown noted that even "a few successful commando raids" - with success far from certain - "aren't going to root out all the terrorists from Afghanistan."

Terrorism generated by Islamic fundamentalists comes from countries throughout Central Asia and the Middle East. Yet attacks into camps in, say, Yemen, friendlier Saudi Arabia or volatile Lebanon hold dangers that dwarf those of Afghanistan. Quick response

Any fight against terrorism, military strategists stress, is war for the determined. On Saturday, Bush echoed that call for stamina. "Victory against terrorism will not take place in a single battle," he said in his radio address from Camp David, Md., "but in a series of decisive actions against terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them."

Still, analysts said, the White House could not avoid pressure to act soon to avoid looking too passive in the aftermath of the bloodiest attack ever on American civilians. "There's some people in the administration who will push quick hits," said William Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency in the Reagan administration. "We're a society used to getting things right away." That, said Odom and others, suggests at least a small strike within days or weeks rather than months.

Again, the options are not easy.

Analysts said the easy targets of abandoned terrorist training grounds in Afghanistan, Sudan or Algeria do not offer much satisfaction. Likewise, bombs aimed at outposts of the Taliban may find empty buildings that leave those Islamic fundamentalists in power. Convinced the terrorists were sponsored by Iraq might mean blasting Baghdad, a practice that has failed for more than a decade to topple Saddam Hussein.

Yet they are all easy to hit. Experts point to the B-2 stealth bomber flying straight from Whiteman Air Force Base at Knob Noster, Mo., as a likely first-strike weapon. Especially with the primitive air defenses over Afghanistan, they said, the B-2 should have little trouble hitting more than a dozen sites with a single sortie that heaves in bombs guided by satellites.

"It's not like you need stealth capability to attack any of the targets on this list," said Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "But since you've got it, why not use it?" The bombers are capable of hitting anywhere on the planet and returning to Missouri without landing. They also can land and reload in the British territory of Diego Garcia to the south in the Indian Ocean.

B-52 bombers could operate from Diego Garcia as well, and sea-launched cruise missiles fired from Navy flotillas in the Arabian Sea could hit with much the same accuracy. Experts agree the advent of satellite guidance has made bombs far more lethal and effective than they once were, but their ability to team up with political goals is controversial. Having studied every bombing campaign from World War I through the Persian Gulf War, Robert Pape concluded in Bombing to Win that air attacks alone don't work.

"States that face serious air attacks go through the emotional response of mounting fear and anger, and that leads to hasty retribution," Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, said in an interview. "As a result, any instant attack is rarely final. "In this case, we're up against cunning and competent opponents. So what we should do is be patient and cunning and competent ourselves."

Analysts said that competence began with picking the right goals of any military campaign in the first place. Odom, the former National Security Agency chief and a retired lieutenant general, reminds that the war is not just with Osama bin Laden or the Taliban. Radical Islamic fundamentalists throughout the world have grown increasingly willing to hit U.S. targets even if it means suicide. Odom said the United States must not figure out how to start a war with them, but how to finish it off. The chief riddle, Odom said, is, "Will we get the outcome we want?"