The foes of democracy must face a united assault
Outside the American Embassy in Moscow the pavement is carpeted with flowers, icons and votive candles. Its switchboard is jammed with sympathetic voices. Across the city, flags flutter at half mast and in Russia's eleven separate time zones, a minute of silence yesterday honoured the dead. On the streets of Calcutta nuns have been leading prayers. In Nairobi Kenyans recall, shuddering, their own experience of terror at the hands of Osama bin Laden. Across the globe old rivalries have been buried, resentments of the sole superpower set aside and snide commentary abandoned. "We are all Americans", wrote Le Monde, in a tribute to the people "to whom we owe our freedom" from which all traces of Parisian sniping were banished.
Every Western leader has pronounced the appalling assaults on Washington and New York to be an attack upon all. This is not mere rhetoric. Under Nato's Article 5, invoked yesterday, America's European allies have an obligation, not merely a moral duty, to stand with it. They must now show that they mean business. They have not always meant what they have said in the years since the Wall came down. There must be no melting into the shadows when Washington makes political demands or takes military action - and it now must do both - that will make Europeans unpopular with foul regimes. There must be clarity on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fuzzy Western policies and fierce commercial rivalries helped Saddam Hussein 's Iraq become a near-nuclear menace to regional and world peace. The American-led alliance that drove him out of Kuwait in 1991 then failed, fatally, to support Iraq's democratic opposition as it rose against the regime. That was in part an American failure of understanding, even of nerve; but anxiety that it could not carry its allies with it was part of the miscalculation.
Saddam remains a menace because subsequent Western divisions, animated in large part by French anxiety to reclaim the money Iraq owes it and by greed for future contracts, have helped to sustain in power this most dangerous of dictators. His existence proclaims to every Muslim the impotence of the Western world - and by doing so, his continuation in power makes Iraq the single greatest source of instability in the Middle East and an encouragement to terrorists everywhere.
Saddam is still the free world's enemy, an enemy that must sooner or later be stilled .
Double-dealings between Europe and America have not been confined to Iraq. There have been endless arguments over Iran, which is subject to American sanctions but whose hardliners continue to gain access to the Russian and European technology they need to realise their own nuclear ambitions. Petty and shortsighted jockeying for influence has also muddied the Palestinian waters. Yassir Arafat has been encouraged to feel that he gains by letting violence run out of control, that, with bullets and bombs flying, the Europeans will put pressure on Israel not on him.
An idea has grown that terrorism could hobble American power, prompting either withdrawal into Washington isolationism or violent over-reaction. This has come about because the United States, in its support for Israel and elsewhere, has so often seemed to stand so very nearly alone.
All Western governments, to a greater or lesser extent, have in the past been negligent or incompetent in controlling terrorism in their midst. Some have hoped for an easier life by looking the other way - as France did in the 1970s with Ayatollah Khomeini. Britain harbours Islamist dissidents whose ambitions, if not their personal actions, are openly violent. The West bears some responsibility even for the emergence of the unspeakable Taleban regime in Afghanistan. All this must end.
To make a fine show of European support now for tough American action is easy; but that support must be sustained in a campaign ahead that will be long, costly and rough.
America must take the lead in planning what has to be an exemplary riposte to this most terrible of criminal assaults. Washington and the West must establish beyond doubt that the civilised world is able and determined to defeat religious extremists and aggressive dictators anywhere that they arise, particularly in the Muslim world, where bigotry, fanaticism and religious hatreds against the West sit too easily alongside the gentler arts of reason. The US needs to develop a firmer political as well as military strategy. It must then explain its purpose better to its own public and to the people of other countries Sloppy intelligence, mistaken targets and the missed aims that marked the Clinton Administration's response to earlier attacks on Americans by Osama bin Laden must be seen for the dangerous errors that they were. Evidence is again rapidly accumulating against bin Laden, the well-organised Saudi dissident now sheltered by Afghanistan. It comes not only from radio intercepts but from the discovery of one of his key lieutenants on the passenger list of one of the aircraft hijacked for use as missiles. Action against him is imperative; and there can be no question merely of bombing more tents in his Kandahar hideout.
President Bush has rightly said that America will make no distinction between the perpetrators of these terrorist atrocities and the governments that give them shelter. Washington should treat Taleban denials of bin Laden 's involvement with deep suspicion; if anything, given the evidence already in America's possession, they should be taken as a sign of complicity. It is even possible that the assassination of Ahmed Shah Masood, the last commander holding out against Taleban, was timed to prevent him taking advantage of American retaliation after the event. Yet there is a problem in expending American firepower on a country already reduced to rubble by war and appalling misgovernment. A people whose rulers have already driven them to the stone age may little notice being bombed back a little further. Unless an attack killed bin Laden and the great majority of his followers, it could do more harm than good The better American course would be, in the first instance at least, to challenge the Taleban regime to make good on its promise to "consider" expelling bin Laden, "if any evidence is presented". Washington should demand the support of Russia, of the anxious Central Asian states that rim Afghanistan to the north and, in particular, of Pakistan, the last Taleban sympathiser, to demand that Kabul yield up bin Laden, dead or alive. If this is refused, Pakistan should be told that installations in Pakistan itself, deemed to render support to Taleban, will themselves be targets. Pakistan has influence in Kabul; it must be made to exercise it.
There is a double virtue in putting extreme pressure on Pakistan to co-operate; unless Islamist extremism in Aghanistan is vigilantly contained, Pakistan will go the way of its rabid neighbour. Already, there are 12,000 religious seminaries in the country, of which 1,200 provide military training to what are intended to be the next jihad warriors; these establishments are so powerful that no Pakistani government, not even the present military regime, dares stamp them out.
As for Afghanistan's northern neighbours, they are already themselves targets of Afghan-bred Muslim insurgents. The assassination of Masood, which is likely to break the last remaining centre of resistance in Afghanistan, removes the last impediment to a Taleban break-out into Central Asia - if not with its own forces, then through lethal and fanatical proxies who receive training in Afghanistan and arms from any of Central Asia's flourishing smuggling rings. There is a common interest, acknowledged openly by Moscow, in joint action with the West to contain the terror spreading up through Tajikistan and the Fergana Valley to the southern rim of Russia itself.
This tragedy for America could be a turning point for the world in its dealings with international terrorism; and, if America strikes back hard and clearly knows what it is about, the response around the world will be relief rather than condemnation. In its anguish this week, America has found respect, honour and offers of help not only among allied democracies but in quarters - North Korea, Syria and Libya included - that Americans have had reason to consider immutably hostile.
In some corners of the Arab world, there is an ominous disjunction between official expressions of condolence and a popular Schadenfreude or, worse, jubilation at the great hurt that has been inflicted. Pictures of dancing Palestinian children have sickened television viewers everywhere. But overwhelmingly, official reaction has reflected a communal sense of vulnerability, shock and disgust.
This instinctive global coming together in solidarity with the dead, precisely because it is rooted in emotion rather than a reasoned assessment of the common interest in defending the rule of law, could all too easily dissipate. As America readies its necessarily many-faceted response, it must nurture the sympathy it has encountered as an integral part of its strategy for striking back and defeating the perpetrators of Tuesday's outrage. In thwarting terrorists, popular revulsion is an asset of incalculable importance. As Britain and every other country that has had to contend with murderous fanatics knows, they depend on sympathisers to shroud their preparations in secrecy and to protect their anonymity after the event. The disavowed terrorist has no hiding place.
If America is to build on and sustain that sympathy, it must attend to two different facets of policy from the outset. First, it must be very clear about what the West judges to be intolerable. Its quarrel is not with fundamentalist Islam. However distasteful, particularly in the treatment of women, some of its tenets and customs may be in Christian eyes, religious revivalism does not in itself imperil others. The distinction must be drawn between fundamentalism and the Islamist extremists whose weapons include terror.
The second demand is one that America's
friends are entitled to make in return for their determined and principled
support. It is that Washington cannot expect loyalty without itself being
prepared to take risks. America's longstanding and extreme aversion to
casualties, which has its roots in Vietnam and was reinforced, in 1993,
in its bungled Somalia operation, should have ended this week. America's
foes do not always recognise it, but the US has ever been pacific to a
fault. It is a giant that seeks to go about its busines undisturbed. Only
in great national emergencies is it stirred. It is stirred now.