ARCHIVE - November, 2001

An Effective Response
Max Paul Friedman,
Wilson Fellow in the Humanities,
Center for the Humanities and the Arts

The terrorist attacks of September 11 demand a response, but an effective one. As American bombs kill enough innocent Afghans to provide a core of truth to Taliban propaganda and to generate widespread revulsion throughout the Islamic world, some cautionary lessons from the past should make us reconsider the effectiveness of a military solution.

To recall that the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization grew out of a coalition of CIA-backed and US-funded mujahedeen is not to shift the blame to ourselves. Instead, it is a warning that a similar miscalculation may now be playing out in the current US embrace of the Northern Alliance, a group whose sordid record includes drug smuggling, summary executions and organized rape of opponents. The Northern Alliance has tried and failed before to govern the country, losing its hold on Kabul after shelling civilian areas of the capital. Its principal sponsors today are Russia and India; the obvious efforts of these two countries to increase their own influence inside Afghanistan are already alienating Pakistan, the most crucial and fragile regional player.

Earlier attempts to punish foreign leaders for their opposition to the United States have demonstrated how difficult it is to avoid “collateral damage” in pursuing the targets of a demonization campaign, and how ineffective such tactics are over the long term. When President Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of Col. Muammar Khaddafi’s residential compound in 1986 in retaliation for an alleged Libyan role in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque that killed and injured U.S. servicemen, the bombs missed their target but killed Khaddafi’s daughter; rather than be cowed into eschewing support for terrorism thereafter, Libya served as a base for the destruction of Pan Am 103 over Scotland.

In 1989, the first President George Bush launched a military assault on Panama City to try to kill or capture Manuel Noriega, whose longtime service to the CIA was eclipsed by his growing nationalism. The attack was successful in its immediate goal of seizing Noriega, but only at the cost of several thousand civilian deaths in the aerial destruction of a slum abutting Noriega’s headquarters. With Noriega sitting in federal prison in Florida, drug trafficking and money laundering in Panama, the stated rationale for the military intervention, actually increased.

United States support for Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein endured all manner of outrages, from Saddam’s gassing of Kurdish separatists to his assassination of opposition figures abroad. This ended with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War of 1991. But again, attempts to kill another former U.S. ally-turned-demon went awry: the bombing during the war of a reinforced bunker thought to shelter Saddam led to the deaths of 300 Iraqi civilians, and two years after the war was over, the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles at Baghdad at sites where Saddam was believed to be sleeping, failing to kill him but managing to kill a number of civilians including Laila bin Attar, the country’s leading female artist.

None of these militarized assassination attempts, nor the bombing of Sudan’s major pharmaceutical factory in mistaken retaliation for the destruction of two American embassies in Africa in 1998, reduced the threat to the security of the United States, but they did generate new enmity toward us. The success of present anti-terrorist efforts may well depend upon whether we are able to learn from our mistakes, or are condemned to repeat them.

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