America Fights Back
Clinton raises the stakes in the war against terrorism
Still, the swiftness with which the attack went forward was out of character for the Clinton administration. Compared with the deliberations that preceded other military actions under Clinton, "this happened in a millisecond," said a former senior defense official. There was no attempt to consult with allies or build international support, which could backfire if public opinion in the Middle East turns strongly against the United States. And there was evidently no major effort after the embassy bombings to persuade the Taliban, the severe Islamic regime that controls most of Afghanistan and is bin Laden's current host, to turn him over or oust him from the country.
A broad information blackout also deferred some sensitive questions about how the attacks took place. The missiles that struck Afghanistan evidently flew from the Arabian Sea over Pakistani airspace, even though U.S. officials had decided not to ask permission of the Pakistanis (or inform any allies of the attack in advance). Administration officials worried, however, that the Pakistanis might detect the missiles and mistake them for a nuclear attack by archrival India. So a U.S. military officer in Pakistan was dispatched to fill the Pakistanis in just before the missiles might have triggered an alert. A senior defense official says those kinds of arrangements may become more commonplace with the emergence of "transnational" terrorists such as bin Laden.
Mystery chemical. U.S. officials have not explained exactly how the Sudanese chemical factory was linked to an urgent need for self-defense. National Security Adviser Berger said the United States had "physical evidence" that the plant was making chemical weapons components. But he and others declined to identify the chemical, and the connection they made with bin Laden is tenuous. Berger said that bin Laden had helped finance the facility and had expressed a general interest in obtaining chemical weapons. Beyond that, there was no evidence that bin Laden was on the verge of acquiring poison gas from the facility. Yet to placate the Arab world and justify the roughly 10 Sudanese casualties from the bombing, says Amatzia Baram of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the United States must "show evidence this was producing something terrible."
Those points may ultimately amount to quibbles, if the military attack turns out to have been largely successful. But as with the defeat of Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 1991, upholding the military victory may be much more difficult than achieving it. More important than destroying the assets of a bin Laden-style terrorist is sending the message that he will be struck repeatedly if his attacks continue, says retired Gen. J. H. Binford Peay, former chief of the Pentagon's Central Command. "If we only get a 30 percent return [a low bombing success rate], that's OK, provided we hit him every time we have solid evidence he did something." But that may require a willingness to attack when the evidence is more ambiguous than it appears to have been in this case, and when the risks of political fallout or casualties are greater.
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