"The U.S. War, Five Years On"

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The U.S. War, Five Years On

By George Friedman

It has been five years since the Sept. 11 attacks. In thinking about

the course of the war against al Qaeda, two facts emerge pre-eminent.

The first is that the war has succeeded far better than anyone would

have thought on Sept. 12, 2001. We remember that day clearly, and had

anyone told us that there would be no more al Qaeda attacks in the

United States for at least five years, we would have been incredulous.

Yet there have been no attacks.

The second fact is that the U.S. intervention in the Islamic world has

not achieved its operational goals. There are multiple insurgencies

under way in Iraq, and the United States does not appear to have

sufficient force or strategic intent to suppress them. In Afghanistan,

the Taliban has re-emerged as a powerful fighting force. It is

possible that the relatively small coalition force -- a force much

smaller than that fielded by the defeated Soviets in Afghanistan --

can hold it at bay, but clearly coalition troops cannot annihilate it.

A Strategic Response

The strategic goal of the United States on Sept. 12, 2001, was to

prevent any further attacks within the United States. Al Qaeda,

defined as the original entity that orchestrated the 1998 attacks

against the U.S. embassies in Africa, the USS Cole strike and 9/11,

has been thrown into disarray and has been unable to mount a follow-on

attack without being detected and disrupted. Other groups, loosely

linked to al Qaeda or linked only by name or shared ideology, have

carried out attacks, but none have been as daring and successful as

9/11.

In response to 9/11, the United States resorted to direct overt and

covert intervention throughout the Islamic world. With the first

intervention, in Afghanistan, the United States and coalition forces

disrupted al Qaeda's base of operations, destabilized the group and

forced it on the defensive. Here also, the stage was set for a long

guerrilla war that the United States cannot win with the forces

available.

The invasion of Iraq, however incoherent the Bush administration's

explanation of it might be, achieved two things. First, it convinced

Saudi Arabia of the seriousness of American resolve and caused the

Saudis to become much more aggressive in cooperating with U.S.

intelligence. Second, it allowed the United States to occupy the most

strategic ground in the Middle East -- bordering on Kuwait, Saudi

Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Iran. From here, the United States was able

to pose overt threats and to stage covert operations against al Qaeda.

Yet by invading Iraq, the United States also set the stage for the

current military crisis.

The U.S. strategy was to disrupt al Qaeda in three ways:

1. Bring the intelligence services of Muslim states -- through

persuasion, intimidation or coercion -- to provide intelligence that

was available only to them on al Qaeda's operations.

2. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq, use main force to disrupt al

Qaeda and to intimidate and coerce Islamic states. In other words, use

Operation 2 to achieve Operation 1.

3. Use the intelligence gained by these methods to conduct a range of

covert operations throughout the world, including in the United States

itself, to disrupt al Qaeda operations.

The problem, however, was this. The means used to compel cooperation

with the intelligence services in countries such as Pakistan or Saudi

Arabia involved actions that, while successful in the immediate

intent, left U.S. forces exposed on a battleground where the

correlation of forces, over time, ceased to favor the United States.

In other words, while the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq did

achieve their immediate ends and did result in effective action

against al Qaeda, the outcome was to expose the U.S. forces to

exhausting counterinsurgency that they were not configured to win.

Hindsight: The Search for an Ideal Strategy

The ideal outcome likely would have been to carry out the first and

third operations without the second. As many would argue, an

acceptable outcome would have been to carry out the Afghanistan

operation without going into Iraq. This is the crux of the debate that

has been raging since the Iraq invasion and that really began earlier,

during the Afghan war, albeit in muted form. On the one side, the

argument is that by invading Muslim countries, the United States has

played into al Qaeda's hands and actually contributed to

radicalization among Islamists -- and that by refraining from

invasion, the Americans would have reduced the threat posed by al

Qaeda. On the other side, the argument has been made that without

these two invasions -- the one for direct tactical reasons, the other

for psychological and political reasons -- al Qaeda would be able to

operate securely and without effective interference from U.S.

intelligence and that, therefore, these invasions were the price to be

paid.

There are three models, then, that have been proposed as ideals:

1. The United States should have invaded neither Afghanistan nor Iraq,

but instead should have relied entirely on covert measures (with

various levels of restraint suggested) to defeat al Qaeda.

2. The United States should have invaded Afghanistan to drive out al

Qaeda and disrupt the organization, but should not have invaded Iraq.

3. The United States needed to invade both Iraq and Afghanistan -- the

former for strategic reasons and to intimidate key players, the latter

to disrupt al Qaeda operations and its home base.

It is interesting to pause and consider that the argument is rarely

this clear-cut. Those arguing for Option 1 rarely explain how U.S.

covert operations would be carried out, and frequently oppose those

operations as well. Those who make the second argument fail to explain

how, given that the command cell of al Qaeda had escaped Afghanistan,

the United States would continue the war -- or more precisely, where

the Americans would get the intelligence to fight a covert war. Those

who argue for the third course -- the Bush administration -- rarely

explain precisely what the strategic purpose of the war was.

In fact, 9/11 created a logic that drove the U.S. responses. Before

any covert war could be launched, al Qaeda's operational structure had

to be disrupted -- at the very least, to buy time before another

attack. Therefore, an attack in Afghanistan had to come first (and

did, commencing about a month after 9/11). Calling this an invasion,

of course, would be an error: The United States borrowed forces from

Russian and Iranian allies in Afghanistan -- and that, coupled with

U.S. air power, forced the Taliban out of the cities to disperse,

regroup and restart the war later.

Covert War and a Logical Progression

The problem that the United States had with commencing covert

operations against al Qaeda was weakness in its intelligence system.

To conduct a covert war, you must have excellent intelligence -- and

U.S. intelligence on al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11 was not good enough

to sustain a global covert effort. The best intelligence on al Qaeda,

simply given the nature of the group as well as its ideology, was in

the hands of the Pakistanis and the Saudis. At the very least, Islamic

governments were more likely to have accumulated the needed

intelligence than the CIA was.

The issue was in motivating these governments to cooperate with the

U.S. effort. The Saudis in particular were dubious about U.S. will,

given previous decades of behavior. Officials in Riyadh frankly were

more worried about al Qaeda's behavior within Saudi Arabia if they

collaborated with the Americans than they were about the United States

acting resolutely. Recall that the Saudis asked U.S. forces to leave

Saudi Arabia after 9/11. Changing the kingdom's attitude was a

necessary precursor to waging the covert war, just as Afghanistan was

a precursor to changing attitudes in Pakistan.

Invading Iraq was a way for the United States to demonstrate will,

while occupying strategic territory to bring further pressure against

countries like Syria. It was also a facilitator for a global covert

war. The information the Saudis started to provide after the U.S.

invasion was critical in disrupting al Qaeda operations. And the

Saudis did, in fact, pay the price for collaboration: Al Qaeda rose up

against the regime, staging its first attack in the kingdom in May

2003, and was repressed.

In this sense, we can see a logical progression. Invading Afghanistan

disrupted al Qaeda operations there and forced Pakistani President

Gen. Pervez Musharraf to step up cooperation with the United States.

Invading Iraq reshaped Saudi thinking and put the United States in a

position to pressure neighboring countries. The two moves together

increased U.S. intelligence capabilities decisively and allowed it to

disrupt al Qaeda.

But it also placed U.S. forces in a strategically difficult position.

Any U.S. intervention in Asia, it has long been noted, places the

United States at a massive disadvantage. U.S. troops inevitably will

be outnumbered. They also will be fighting on an enemy's home turf,

far away from everything familiar and comfortable. If forced into a

political war, in which the enemy combatants use the local populace to

hide themselves -- and if that populace is itself hostile to the

Americans -- the results can be extraordinarily unpleasant. Thus, the

same strategy that allowed the United States to disrupt al Qaeda also

placed U.S. forces in strategically difficult positions in two

theaters of operation.

Mission Creep and Crisis

The root problem was that the United States did not crisply define the

mission in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Obviously, the immediate

purpose was to create an environment in which al Qaeda was disrupted

and the intelligence services of Muslim states felt compelled to

cooperate with the United States. But by revising the mission upward

-- from achieving these goals to providing security to rooting out

Baathism and the Taliban, then to providing security against

insurgents and even to redefining these two societies as democracies

-- the United States overreached. The issue was not whether democracy

is desirable; the issue was whether the United States had sufficient

forces at hand to reshape Iraqi and Afghan societies in the face of

resistance.

If the Americans had not at first expected resistance, they certainly

discovered that they were facing it shortly after taking control of

the major cities of each country. At that moment, they had to make a

basic decision between pursuing the United States' own interests or

defining the interest as transforming Afghan and Iraqi society. At the

moment Washington chose transformation, it had launched into a task it

could not fulfill -- or, if it could fulfill it, would be able to do

so only with enormously more force than it placed in either country.

When we consider that 300,000 Soviet troops could not subdue

Afghanistan, we get a sense of how large a force would have been

needed.

The point here is this: The means used by the United States to cripple

al Qaeda also created a situation that was inherently dangerous to the

United States. Unless the mission had been parsed precisely -- with

the United States doing what it needed to do to disrupt al Qaeda but

not overreaching itself -- the outcome would be what we see now. It

is, of course, easy to say that the United States should have

intervened, achieved its goals and left each country in chaos; it is

harder to do. Nevertheless, the United States intervened, did not

leave the countries and still has chaos. That can be said with

hindsight. Acting so callously with foresight is more difficult.

There remains the question of whether the United States could have

crippled al Qaeda without invading Iraq -- a move that still would

have left Afghanistan in its current state, but which would seem to

have been better than the situation now at hand. The answer to that

question rests on two elements. First, it is simply not clear that the

Saudis' appreciation of the situation, prior to March 2003, would have

moved them to cooperate, and extensive diplomacy over the subject

prior to the invasion had left the Americans reasonably convinced that

the Saudis could do more. Advocates of diplomacy would have to answer

the question of what more the United States could have done on that

score. Now, perhaps, over time the United States could have developed

its own intelligence sources within al Qaeda. But time was exactly

what the United States did not have.

But most important, the U.S. leadership underestimated the

consequences of an invasion. They set their goals as high as they did

because they did not believe that the Iraqis would resist -- and when

resistance began, they denied that it involved anything more than the

ragtag remnants of the old regime. Their misreading of Iraq was

compounded with an extraordinary difficulty in adjusting their

thinking as reality unfolded.

But even without the administration's denial, we can see in hindsight

that the current crisis was hardwired into the strategy. If the United

States wanted to destroy al Qaeda, it had to do things that would suck

it into the current situation -- unless it was enormously skilled and

nimble, which it certainly was not. In the end, the primary objective

-- defending the homeland -- was won at the cost of trying to achieve

goals in Iraq and Afghanistan that cannot be achieved.

In the political debate that is raging today in the United States, our

view is that both sides are quite wrong. The administration's argument

for building democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan misses the point that

the United States cannot be successful in this, because it lacks the

force to carry out the mission. The administration's critics, who

argue that Iraq particularly diverted attention from fighting al

Qaeda, fail to appreciate the complex matrix of relationships the

United States was trying to adjust with its invasion of Iraq.

The administration is incapable of admitting that it has overreached

and led U.S. forces into an impossible position. Its critics fail to

understand the intricate connections between the administration's

various actions and the failure of al Qaeda to strike inside the

United States for five years.

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