page 3 3. The U.S. Response to
the Terrorist Attack In his September 20 speech
before Congress after the terrorist attack, President George
W. Bush vowed, "I will not yield; I will not rest; I will
not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security
for the American people." In that speech, Bush set forth his
plans--as leader of the world's only remaining
superpower--for eliminating the threat to order posed by
international terrorism. So it is worthwhile to quote
selective sections. First, Bush defined the victims of the
September 11 attack as people from around the world. The
victims included Later, he said, that this is
not "just America's fight": Contending that the attack
on America was a crime against the world community, Bush
defined the enemy in an equally sweeping way: By including supportive
foreign governments in the scope of the U.S. response to
terrorism, Bush signaled that a nation's claim of
sovereignty would not limit the U.S. acting as world
policeman to eliminate terrorism.[39]
Moreover, the world's superpower would not draw back in
exercising its self- assumed police power: An estimated 88 percent of
the U.S. public viewed or read Bush's speech to Congress,
and nine in ten judged it as "excellent"(62%) or "good"
(25%).[40]
Although the American public overwhelmingly approved Bush's
speech--and 89 percent favored taking "military action in
retaliation" for the attack- many worried about the specific
military action that Bush would take. In a nationwide
telephone poll of 619 people taken on the evening of
September 11, 71 percent of the respondents felt that the
U.S. should refrain from military strikes until it could
identify "the terrorist organization's responsible for
today's attack, even if it takes months to clearly identify
them."[41]
However, only 45 percent of the respondents were "very
confident" in Bush's ability to handle the situation, and
about 20 percent were not confident that he was up to the
job. Bush--who had not traveled
much abroad and was unschooled in foreign affairs--was
viewed by many (even at home) as a "cowboy" who distrusted
international institutions and cooperation. He unabashedly
promoted American interests over the concerns of foreign
nations and spoke disparagingly about involving the military
in "nation building" projects in countries troubled by
internal conflict. Eventually, an overwhelming majority in
the country was pleasantly surprised by his actions, which
showed focus and patience. Bush's Focus: The
events of September 11 changed Bush himself, causing him to
focus on foreign affairs to the virtual exclusion of
domestic politics. Within days, political reporters were
writing about a "transformed" presidency.[42]
Bush told his cabinet that nothing about their roles would
ever be the same--that everything paled before the war on
terrorism, which he said, "is the purpose of our
administration." A top aide said, "The terrorist attacks
impacted him personally . . . His days have changed." Two
weeks later, the same aide observed, "The question in
meetings is, 'How is this helping or hurting our effort to
fight global terrorism?"[43] Bush's Patience: Most
scholars who closely follow international politics were
relieved that Bush did not strike back quickly and blindly
with military force. As early as September 14, Congress had
granted him authority to "use all necessary and appropriate
force against those nations, organizations or persons he
determines planned, authorized committed or aided the
terrorist attacks . . . or harbored such organizations or
persons." Instead, Bush proposed building a "global
coalition against terrorism."[44]
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had already
responded by invoking (for the first time) the treaty's
Article 5, qualifying the attack on America as an attack on
the alliance.[45]
By early November, NATO officials began planning for
concerted action in support of the antiterrorist campaign.
Even earlier, the United States received military support
from Canada, Britain, and Germany--among other
countries.[46] That the United States was
actively cultivating international support was signaled by
three abrupt changes in its foreign policy: 2.Whereas President Bush
had disparaged using the military in "nation-building"
(remaking foreign governments), he now said, "We should
not simply leave after a military objective has been
achieved."[48] 3.Whereas (as noted
above), the United States had for years failed to pay
more than $500 million in debt to the United Nations, now
the House quickly cleared legislation to pay
up. But most of the public as
well as most opinion leaders welcomed these changes and
Bush's deliberate approach to framing a response to the
terrorist attack. A policeman seeking new
friends:[49]
On November 6, less than two months after the attack, Bush
spoke via satellite to leaders of Central and Eastern
European nations meeting in Warsaw. Seeking to broaden his
coalition against global terrorism, Bush said, "You
are our partners in the fight against terrorism, and we
share an important moment in history." Noting that their
citizens had lived for nearly fifty years under totalitarian
regimes, he warned, "Today our freedom is threatened once
again." This time, he said, the threat came from an global
network of terrorists operating in more than sixty nations,
including their own. He asked for their support in building
"an international coalition of unprecedented scope and
cooperation" to conduct the war against
terrorism.[50] There was something poignant
about Bush's appeal to leaders whose countries more than a
decade ago were allied with the former Soviet Union against
the United States. Literally overnight, the terrorist attack
on September 11 had transformed American global policy. In
Secretary of State Colin Powell's words, the situation
called for a "new strategic framework" in America's
relationships with other nations.[51]
Now former communist countries were being courted as allies.
Even Russia was solicited for support, and President
Vladimir Putin responded by accepting the deployment of
United States troops in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and
elsewhere in former Soviet republics still under Russian
influence.[52]
The first week in November, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, on the way to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan where
American forces were already stationed, met with President
Putin in Moscow. There, inside the Kremlin, the American
Defense Secretary talked with the former Soviet KBG
espionage officer about using Russian intelligence to
support the U.S. military campaign in
Afghanistan.[53] The coalition strikes
back: The U.S. spent three weeks following the September
11 attack lining up international support and planning for a
military response before taking action. Although it clearly
led the assault against the al Qaeda network in Afghanistan,
the United States portrayed itself as leading an
international coalition against terrorism. In truth, it did
get sufficient support from other countries to justify its
claim. For example, the first airstrikes (which did not
occur until October 7) were conducted jointly with Britain.
By the end of the month, the U.S. released a list of twenty
nations offering material help to the military campaign.
Table 2 shows which countries made offers and which offers
were accepted as of November 7. For the first two weeks, the
war consisted mainly of U.S. planes dropping bombs, often by
high-flying B-52 bombers. The U.S. military assured the
public that these plans were not laying a carpet of
untargeted "dumb" bombs (as in Vietnam) that
indiscriminately killed civilians as well as fighters.
Instead, they were "smart" bombs, guided by tracking
devices, that could selectively hit military targets, thus
minimizing civilian deaths. Military spokesmen had said that
about bombs used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but a
declassified government report cited "a pattern of
overstatement" by the spokesmen.[54]
Later, the military claimed that the bombs used in the 1999
Balkan War were even smarter, yet one managed to destroy the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. In 2001, the bombs may have
been super smart, but still bombs mistakenly killed many
civilians and some friendly fighters from the Northern
Alliance.[55]
On the ground, the U.S. role was limited to assisting the
Northern Alliance in attacking the Taliban, which were
fighting as "proxy forces" for U.S. troops. The United
States did not lead a ground attack until October 19, when
some 100 Special Operations Forces struck at an airfield and
Taliban headquarters. By the end of October, the
American press was reporting doubts among U.S. citizens on
the progress of the war against terrorism, publishing
stories titled The U.S. press also reported
worldwide concerns with the military campaign in stories
titled One western diplomat
said: Eventually, the relentless
bombing on Taliban and al Qaeda targets, which had seemed
ineffective, paid off by weakening their forces. On November
9, Northern Alliance forces captured the northern city,
Mazari-Sharif.[63]
On November 10, they took the northeastern city of Taliqan,
and two days later they moved into Kabul. By December 6,
Taliban forces agreed to surrender their last stronghold,
Kandahar. On December 20, Hamid Karzai arrived in Kabul to
head an interim government along with British Royal Marines
in the vanguard of a United Nations peacekeeping
force. The coalition wins:
After a slow beginning, the war against the Taliban advanced
at an astonishingly rapid pace, concluding positively in at
least five respects: 2. The outcome was
decisive: the Taliban regime was replaced by an interim
government negotiated with U.N supervision, and an
international peacekeeping force was sent to patrol
Kabul. 3. Most Afghan people
welcomed the end of the Taliban's harsh legal code, which
not only required that women be fully covered and men
wear long beards but also banned flying kites, listening
to music, playing chess, watching television, and other
simple pleasures that people enjoyed all over the
world.[64] 4. The muslim world did
not not rise up against the fall of an Islamic regime,
perhaps because most of the actual combat was done by
other Afghan muslims. 5. Indeed, following the
destruction of the al Qaeda terrorist operation in
Afghanistan, other nations troubled by fundamentalist
Islamic groups--e.g., Pakistan,[65]
Singapore,[66]
the Philippines,[67]
Kuwait,[68]
and even Syria[69]
and Yemen[70]--began
to crack down on them. For the United States, the
war in Afghanistan carried one negative result and one
especially positive outcome. The negative result was the
failure to capture either Osama bin Laden or Mullah Mohammad
Omar. On the positive side, very few American troops
died--owing to the use of native Afghans as proxy troops and
to selective use of American special operations forces. A
headline in the New York Times reflected the relief
of many U.S. citizens, "Surprise, War Works after
All!"[71] Nothing succeeds like
success: Early European critics of war in Afghanistan
were quieted by the war's pace and outcome. Antonio
Carlucci, an editor of L'Espresso, a left-leaning
Italian news magazine was quoted as saying, "The critics
became silent because we began to see results." Nöel
Mamère, a French legislator and author of an anti-war
letter to Le Mond, confessed, "I overreacted when I
said that the military response launched by the Americans is
an act of war against the Afghan people." Eckart Lohse,
Berlin correspondent for Algemeine Zeitung in
Frankfurter, said, "Now the left is really only discussing
the peacekeeping, and the political problems seem to have
disappeared."[72] In December, 2001, following
the positive news from Afghanistan, 90 percent of the U.S.
public approved "of the way George W. Bush is handling the
campaign against terrorism."[73]
People abroad, however, were concerned about the
aggressiveness of the war on terrorism and about Bush's
commitment to a multilateral approach in foreign policy.
Would the U.S. project its war on terrorism into Iraq,
hoping to topple President Sadam Hussein?[74]
Would President Bush, who in late 2001unilaterally ended the
1973 Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, become
flushed with success over the Afghanistan war and operate
more unilaterally? Europeans were clearly
concerned with both questions. An Italian government
official asked an American reporter about the end of the
treaty: "Why announce it now? Was it that
urgent?"[75]
Charles Grant, director of the London-based Center for
European Reform, said, "If America misses this opportunity
to have a closer relationship with Russia, then relations
[with Europe] will suffer." Similar sentiments about
the United States were expressed by an official in the
European Union: "We thought they were correcting a
unilateralist trend when they put together a coalition to
fight terrorism, but now we see the forces for going it
alone are very much ascendant in the Bush
administration."[76] More systematic research
revealed widespread suspicion of the United States among
ordinarily friendly foreign leaders. In a lengthy analysis,
a senior American journalist headlined his story, "A Nation
Alone: Even Our Friends Don't Share America's Image of
Itself."[77]
The writer based his analysis on a survey of 275
"influentials"--leaders in business, government, the media,
and culture in 24 countries--interviewed between November 12
and December 13, 2001.[78]
Forty leaders came from the United States and 235 from other
countries. One question asked specifically about the war on
terrorism: "Do you think the US is taking into account the
interests of its partners in the fight against terrorism or
do you think the US is acting mainly on its own interests?"
Of the U.S. leaders, 70 percent said that they were taking
other countries' interest into account, compared with only
33 percent for all 235 foreign leaders. As shown in Figure
1, differences with the U.S. were consistently sharp among
all regional breakdowns of foreign leaders. bThe question was, "How do you see the
conflict? Do you think the US is taking into account the
interests of its partners in the fight against terrorism
or do you think the US is acting mainly on its own
interests?
. . .
We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one
against another, drive them from place to place, until
there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations
that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every
nation, in every region, now has a decision to make.
Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
From this day forward, any nation that continues to
harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the
United States as a hostile regime.1.Whereas Bush and
other Republicans had once embraced the so-called "Powell
Doctrine" that required a clear goal before military
involvement and a plan for extracting its forces, the
United States was heading into an Asian war that prompted
frightening comparisons with its Vietnam
failure.[47]
"Survey Shows Doubts Stirring on Terror
War,"[57]
and
"A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as
Vietnam."[58]
"Public Apprehension Felt in Europe over the Goals of
Afghanistan Bombing,"[60]
and
"More and More, Other Countries See the War as Solely
America's."[61]
1. The war was
short, lasting less than two months, and ending before
winter fully arrived.
aThe survey conducted and reported by
the PEW Research Center, "America Admired, Yet Its New
Vulnerability Seen as Good Thing, Say Opinion Leaders,"
December 19, 2001. These data were reported on January
18, 2002, at
http://www.people-press.org/reports/print.php3?PageID=62.