The corollary that frames U.S. options is that only two countries in the region have been potentially large and powerful enough to dominate the Arabian Peninsula: Iran and Iraq. Rather than occupy Arabia to protect the flow of oil, the United States has followed the classic strategy of empire, encouraging the rivalry between Iran and Iraq, playing off one against the other to balance and thus effectively neutralize the power of each. This strategy preceded the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979, when the United States encouraged a conflict between Iran and Iraq, then negotiated a settlement between them that maintained the tension.
After the fall of the shah, the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, largely secular but ethnically Sunni, attacked the Islamist and largely Shiite nation of Iran. Throughout the 1980s, the United States shifted its weight between the sides, trying to prolong the war by making sure that neither side collapsed. About two years after the war, which Iraq won by a narrow margin, Saddam tried to claim the Arabian Peninsula, beginning with invading Kuwait. At this point the United States applied overwhelming force, but only long enough to evict, not invade, Iraq. The United States once again made certain that the regional balance of power maintained itself, thereby protecting the flow of oil from the Arabian Peninsula—America’s core interest—without the need for an American occupation.
This was the status quo when Osama bin Laden tried to redefine the geopolitical reality of the Middle East and South Asia on September 11, 2001. With the attacks on New York and Washington he inflicted pain and suffering, but the most profound effect of his action was to entice an American president to abandon America’s successful, long-standing strategy. In effect, Bin Laden succeeded in getting an American president to take the bait.
In the long term, Bin Laden’s goal was to re-create the caliphate, the centralized rule of Islam that had been instituted in the seventh century and that had dominated the Middle East until the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Bin Laden understood that even to begin to achieve this return to religious geopolitical unity, nation-states in the Islamic world would have to undergo revolutions to unseat their current governments, then replace them with Islamist regimes that shared his vision and beliefs. In 2001, the only nation-state that shared his vision fully was Afghanistan. Isolated and backward, it could serve as a base of operations, but only temporarily. It might be a springboard to more important nations like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, but it was too isolated and primitive ever to be more than that.
Bin Laden’s analysis was that many in the Muslim world shared his beliefs in some sense, but that given the realities of power, their support would only be tepid and insufficient to his ends. To begin moving his project forward, he had to trigger an uprising in at least one and preferably several of the more important Islamic countries. Doing that was impossible as long as the Muslim masses viewed their governments as overwhelmingly powerful and immovable fixtures.
As Bin Laden saw it, this problem was primarily one of perception, because the governments in the region were in fact weaker than they appeared. The apparent military and economic power of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt derived from the relationship of these countries with the Christian world (as he thought of it), and particularly with the leading Christian power, the United States. But Bin Laden surmised that even with their borrowed power, these governments were still vulnerable. His task was to demonstrate this weakness to the Muslim masses, then set in motion a series of uprisings that would transform the politics of the Islamic world. He failed in this, but his followers have continued this strategy, and their attempts to reshape the politics of the Islamic world, which have been under way since the nineteenth century, will continue to be a significant geopolitical theme of the decade to come.
The short-term goal of the September 11 attacks was to accelerate this process by attacking prominent American targets at the heart of the imperial power structure. Bin Laden’s hope was that by exposing the vulnerability of even the United States, he could diminish Muslim perceptions that their own governments were invulnerable.
The attacks of September 11 were only marginally about the United States, and the exact nature of the American response to Bin Laden’s gambit mattered little, because any response could be used to his advantage. If the Americans did nothing, this would confirm their weakness. If the Americans responded aggressively, this would confirm that they were indeed the enemies of Islam.
But while the attacks were aimed primarily at the Muslim psyche, the psychological impact on Americans turned out to be hugely important. The unexpectedness of the attacks, the fact that they were mounted using a fixture of everyday life—commercial airliners—and the fact that casualties were substantial created a sense of panic. How many other teams were in place? Where would al Qaeda strike next? Did al Qaeda possess weapons of mass destruction? Even more than in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Americans emerged from the shock of September 11 with a sense of personal dread. The possibility that they and their loved ones might be killed next was very real to them. This was a pervasive and profound sense of unease that the government had to address by appearing to take decisive action.
The psychological alarms that went off among the American people served to compound the strategic problem facing the U.S. government. Al Qaeda by itself—unless it did possess weapons of mass destruction—did not pose a genuine strategic threat. It could not shatter the United States. However, if the disruption it initiated had the desired effect in the Islamic world and regimes that were linked to the United States started to fall, ultimately that would have a huge impact on American strategy. If the Egyptian government were overthrown, for example, the position of Israel would change and an American anchor in the region would be threatened. If the Saudi government was endangered, the flow of oil from the region might be interrupted. The strategic danger was not the destruction of America’s population centers, economic infrastructure, or military might, but simply al Qaeda’s potential political success in the region—and that quite apart from Bin Laden’s distant dream of the caliphate.
The United States as well as al Qaeda identified the strategic battlefield clearly: the hearts and minds of Muslims. But for the president it was American hearts and minds that first needed to be calmed and reassured that actions were being taken to protect the homeland. The FBI moved aggressively to track down anyone even remotely suspected of being associated with al Qaeda, and security was revamped at airports, but neither effort was particularly effective at the time. In many ways, the United States continues to operate under the doctrine of putting enormous resources into security measures of limited effectiveness in order to calm the American public’s legitimate fears. Reconciling resources with operational reality and public perception will be a critical task for the next decade.
The assault on America’s sense of well-being also demanded that al Qaeda’s leaders be captured or killed. In strategic terms this was a questionable priority, but a president must satisfy not only the desire for reassurance but also the desire for revenge. Here the challenge was compounded by the fact that al Qaeda is a sparse network spread out around the globe, operating without a central headquarters or a conventional chain of command. Al Qaeda encourages sympathizers to strike out on their own and innovate. So while it is possible to carry out acts of retribution against these terrorists, it is impossible to actually destroy al Qaeda, because it isn’t an organization in any conventional sense. Because there is no infrastructure and no chain of command, there is no real head to be decapitated.
What did make strategic sense was a minimal infusion of force to disrupt al Qaeda’s planning, training, and limited command capabilities. Al Qaeda considered itself safe while operating out of Afghanistan, a landlocked country with no ports of entry. Bin Laden and his colleagues had some familiarity with American operations, both from observing Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and from training with Americans in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s. Desert Storm in particular had showed al Qaeda that even when ports were available, Americans planned obsessively, and planning took time. With winter approaching, al Qaeda’s rational estimate was that even if the United States chose to go looking for them in Afghanistan, no action was possible before the spring. The Pakistani port of Karachi would be essential for an invasion, and negotiations for its use might delay an assault even longer.
The Bush administration, however, calculated that it couldn’t wait until spring. The president really did want to decapitate or at least disrupt al Qaeda, but politically he had to respond to demands for an immediate and highly visible response. The attacks had shaken confidence in America’s defenses, and the president had to rebuild that confidence while also building a political base for what could be an extended war. He could ill afford a crisis in confidence about American prosperity at this juncture, so it was in this atmosphere that the war on terror began to affect economic decisions as well. If it took six months to launch American counteraction, the already tenuous political situation would deteriorate, and the president would lose support for the effort even before it was launched. Bush’s decision to go ahead was one of those individual judgments that can and do affect the lives of millions over the span of a decade, and certainly the fallout from that decision will continue to color much of the decade to come.
There was also a legitimate strategic reason for haste: the United States wanted to make certain that regimes in the Middle East didn’t fall, or even begin to recalculate their interests. While the United States might have been perceived as a great power, it also was seen as a power that was unprepared to risk a great deal in the region. Ronald Reagan’s decision to withdraw from Beirut after the bombing of the Marine barracks, George H. W. Bush’s decision not to go on to Baghdad after liberating Kuwait, and Bill Clinton’s decision to withdraw from Somalia, followed by his rather anemic response to pre-9/11 al Qaeda attacks, all created an image of a country unwilling to take risks and suffer losses. Meanwhile, Muslim governments saw the very real possibility of being toppled by political unrest fomented by al Qaeda’s capable and ruthless covert force, particularly if they collaborated with the United States.
These governments were not about to become jihadists, but neither were they prepared to expose themselves on behalf of the United States. They expected the United States to continue its policy of limited risk taking, so for them, cooperation with the U.S. appeared to pose serious risks with few advantages. The Americans demanded intelligence sharing on al Qaeda, for instance, but these governments, which did not expect the United States to stand by them for the long haul, were reluctant to participate. The longer the United States failed to act, the lower the Muslim countries’ propensity to assist.
Al Qaeda miscalculated by focusing too much on the consequences of the attack for the Islamic world and not enough on the political and strategic pressures September 11 created for Bush. There was no doubt that the United States would act aggressively, and for the reasons cited above, sooner rather than later. The target had to be al Qaeda, which meant that the area of operations had to be Afghanistan.
In mid-September 2001, the United States sent in CIA operatives to make deals with local Afghan warlords. At the same time, the United States dispatched Special Operations Forces and paramilitary CIA units to fight alongside anti-Taliban Afghans and to target American air strikes on Taliban positions. In particular, the United States made a deal with the Northern Alliance, a Russian-backed group of anti-Taliban organizations. Having been defeated by the Taliban in their civil war in the 1990s, the Northern Alliance now welcomed the opportunity to strike back, and the Russians had no objection. Other warlords were simply bought. The United States also had the active cooperation of Iran.
Afghanistan provided the illusion of an invasion, but what really happened was the resumption of a civil war, backed by American air power. The fighting that began a month after September 11 was done primarily by Afghans, supported by air strikes from carriers and bombers based in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. But rather than massing in front of the major cities and becoming targets to be bombed by B-52s, the Taliban, in classic insurgent fashion, dispersed, then regrouped later to resume the battle.
As a result, the Taliban was never actually defeated, but the United States did achieve three of its goals. First, it reassured the American public that it was able to protect them by mounting military action anywhere in the world. This wasn’t altogether true, but it was true enough to be comforting. Second, it signaled to the Islamic world that the United States was absolutely committed to the conflict. More sophisticated than the American public, Muslim leaders noted that the major American contribution was air power, while the heavy lifting was done by the Afghans. This was not definitive evidence of American commitment; it was, however, better than no action. Third, the action inflicted damage on al Qaeda. Bin Laden and others escaped, but their command-and-control structure was disrupted, which forced the leaders to become fugitives. As a result, they became increasingly isolated and largely irrelevant.
Afghanistan was in some ways a sleight of hand, but it achieved what could be achieved. The United States had launched a disruptive spoiling attack—a classic American maneuver. The Bush administration installed and protected a government, knowing that most of Afghanistan was outside its reach and that creating a democracy there was not in the cards. Nine years later, Afghanistan is still far from resolved, and it will certainly be the problem that has to be solved in order to move ahead in the next decade.
From al Qaeda’s point of view, however, U.S. actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East served as clear evidence for Muslims that the United States was their enemy. The jihadists waited for uprisings and toppled regimes—an upheaval that never came. The regimes survived, partly because the Islamic street, as it was called, feared that the security apparatus of their regimes was still brutally effective, and partly because these regimes continued to hedge their bets. They read the U.S. spoiling attack for what it was and held back their own commitment. Both Saudi Arabia’s and Pakistan’s intelligence sharing remained limited, as neither wanted to commit itself to the United States without clear signs of how far the U.S. was prepared to go. As it became clearer that there would be no uprisings, al Qaeda became more aggressive in the region.