Author: Charles Krauthammer
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: October 30, 2001
The war is not going well. The Taliban
have not yielded ground. Not a single important Taliban leader has been
killed, or captured or has defected. On the contrary. The Taliban have
captured and executed our great Pashtun hope, Abdul Haq. The Joint Chiefs
express surprise at the tenacity of the enemy.
The war is not going well and it
is time to say why. It has been fought with half-measures. It has been
fought with an eye on the wishes of our "coalition partners." It has been
fought to assuage the Arab "street." It has been fought to satisfy the
diplomats rather than the generals.
Thirty years ago in Vietnam, we
fought a war finely calibrated to win "hearts and minds." Bomb today, pause
tomorrow. That strategy met with nothing but pain and defeat. One of the
products of that war was Colin Powell. He and his generation vowed that
never again would American lives be sacrificed, their missions compromised,
their objectives distorted to satisfy purely political objectives.
And yet for three weeks in Afghanistan
we held back from massively bombing the Taliban front lines facing the
Northern Alliance. Why? Because Pakistan does not like the Northern Alliance.
So we calibrate the war to produce a precise ethnic balance, satisfying
our various allies, for a post-Taliban Afghanistan.
But you don't get to post-Taliban
until you've defeated the Taliban. And you don't defeat the Taliban with
antiseptic attacks on fixed installations and pinpoint raids on front-line
positions. You do it by scaring the living hell out of the enemy, producing
in him the rational calculation that you're going to win and he'd better
change sides.
The president repeatedly emphasizes
that this is not a war against civilians. We are expending enormous effort
on dropping food. The Pentagon feels obliged to respond to every Taliban
claim of civilian casualties -- diverting reconnaissance and other resources
to investigate stories that are often fabricated.
Why have we turned this into an
operation for the liberation of Afghanistan? Afghanistan will be liberated
if we succeed. But that is not why we are there. We are there to avenge
5,000 murdered Americans and to protect the rest by killing those preparing
to murder again.
That defines our mission: destroying
al Qaeda and the Taliban. What comes after will be an interesting problem.
But it comes after. To restrain our military now in order to placate the
diplomats is a tragic reprise of Vietnam.
The error began in the very naming
of the mission. It started out as Infinite Justice. But we could not have
that, we were told, because it might offend Muslims, who believe that infinite
justice comes only from God. (Don't Christians and Jews believe that too?
Were they offended?) So we changed it to Enduring Freedom. Very nice. Too
nice. We should have called it Righteous Might, the phrase Franklin Roosevelt
used in his Pearl Harbor speech to describe what the enemy would now be
facing.
Instead, the enemy today is facing
calibration and proportionality. The "Powell Doctrine" once preached overwhelming
force to achieve victory. Yet we have held back. Why have we not loosed
the B-52s and the B-2s to carpet-bomb Taliban positions? And why are we
giving the Taliban sanctuary in their cities? We could drop leaflets giving
civilians 48 hours to evacuate, after which the cities become legitimate
military targets. We know our enemy is planning more mass murder. Every
day of urban safety for them is another day of peril for innocent Americans.
Restraint has already cost a lot.
An important element of winning is psychological shock, the key to demoralization,
defection and disintegration. We have squandered it. Now that the first
wave of American power has come and gone, the Taliban are ever more convinced
of American uncertainty and of their own indestructibility.
Our solicitousness knows no bounds.
The president urges the children of America to each send a dollar to feed
Afghan children. He now urges American schoolchildren to find Muslim pen
pals. After the carnage of Sept. 11, should not our Muslim allies be urging
their people to seek out American pen pals? We were the ones attacked,
by Muslims invoking Islam. Why are we are the ones required to demonstrate
religious tolerance?
Nice is nice but this is war. We
cannot fight it apologetically -- the very talk of holding our fire during
Ramadan is beyond belief -- with one hand tied behind our back.
Half-measures are for wars of choice,
wars like Vietnam. In wars of choice, losing is an option. You lose and
still survive as a nation. The war on terrorism, like World War II, is
a war of necessity. Losing is not an option. Losing is fatal. This is no
time for restraint and other niceties. This is a time for righteous might.
