Missile Strikes: The Double-Edged Sword of a Strong State

A missile strike is considered the strong state’s weapon. With the advanced technology now available, such a force is relatively easy to wield. It reduces to a minimum the attacker’s risk of casualties and radiates back home a sense of a “clean, bloodless operation.” On the other hand, air bombing increases the odds of missing the true perpetrators, while killing innocent people.

Despite its problems, the missile strike is still one of the few methods available to democratic states determined to fight terrorists and the governments that sponsor them.

On Thursday, 30 years after Israel adopted missile strikes as a retaliatory policy to combat terrorism, the United States embraced the same tactic. As the Israeli experience has shown, the raids may have a symbolic value as well as a political significance. Operationally, however, their effectiveness is doubtful.

Bombing does not restrain terrorists; it only enlarges the vicious circle of violence. The United States should not delude itself that the targets of its recent missile attacks--primarily the Saudi Arabian millionaire-turned-terrorist Osama bin Laden and the Sudanese and Afghan fundamentalist governments--will sit still. It is expected that Bin Laden’s network of terrorists and agents, on behalf of Khartoum and Kabul, will seek to respond quickly and take revenge by hitting U.S. installations and U.S. civilians. In the eyes of the terrorists, every U.S. tourist or business traveler is a legitimate target.

Even the reasoning, the very vocabulary, used by President Bill Clinton and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen was similar to the usual Israeli explanations. Hours after the raids, top administration officials described the operations as aiming “to prevent and disrupt” future attacks against U.S. targets, but they were clearly meant to avenge the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

From the intelligence and political points of view, the operations proved rather impressive. To reach the conclusion, as expressed by Clinton, that “we have convincing evidence [Bin Laden’s] groups played the key role in the embassy bombings,” requires excellent detective work--FBI experts had interrogated various suspects in Kenya and extracted vital information.

The raids also prove that the U.S. intelligence community, (mainly the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency), assisted by Israeli and Egyptian intelligence analysts and possibly by some pro-Western elements in the Pakistani secret services, had accurate information about the targets in both Afghanistan and Sudan. The surgical precision of the attacks is probably only the visible tip of extensive and clandestine intelligence efforts developed over several years.

Collecting the essential data about Bin Laden’s compounds inside Afghanistan and about his networks would not have been an easy task--especially because the CIA did not take the opportunity to gather this information in the 1980s, when it had the chance.

At that time, the agency was cultivating Bin Laden and his allies in the Afghan moujahedeen movement both directly and indirectly (via its Pakistani counterparts). They were fighting the Soviet occupation, and the CIA was helping to provide them with weapons, documentation and training facilities. CIA operatives repeatedly failed to collect such basic information as the names, ID numbers and affiliations of the fundamentalists.

Only in the early ‘90s did the U.S. intelligence community reach the conclusion that these “allies” had turned into enemies. Already in 1992, Bin Laden was involved in an aborted attempt to bomb the U.S. embassy in Aden, South Yemen. Since then, he has been involved in several attacks against U.S. interests around the world and has become a prime target for international intelligence efforts led by the United States.

Under international pressure, the Saudi Arabian authorities stripped Bin Laden of his citizenship and later the Sudanese government expelled him. Stateless, Bin Laden finally sought refuge in one of the world’s most isolated regimes, the Taliban government of Afghanistan.

To track Bin Laden required human sources and sophisticated interception of his communications. This was possible because he uses his own satellite to communicate between his headquarters in Afghanistan and his followers--dispersed in several European countries (mainly France, Germany and Britain), throughout the Middle East (Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran) and in Africa (Somalia and Sudan).

The decision by Clinton and his national-security advisors to attack the supposed chemical facilities in an industrial suburb of Khartoum was a daring one. According to U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources, the Shifa Pharmaceutical Facility is partly owned by Bin Laden’s economic empire and used as a front to conceal its real purpose: the manufacture, with the help of Iraqi scientists, of chemical agents for use in terrorist acts.

The timing of the strikes raises the suspicion that Clinton used them to divert attention from his domestic troubles. Yet it is difficult to understand why Clinton had not ordered an attack on Sudan much earlier. The pro-Iranian, fundamentalist regime of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir and his key supporter, Sheik Hassan Turabi, the spiritual and religious authority, is a rogue state.

Intelligence accumulated since 1993 has revealed that Sudan serves as a safe haven for terrorist groups who claim to be Muslim-inspired. Using U.S. spy satellite images and information obtained from other sources, U.S., Israeli and Egyptian security agencies have detected the presence of hundreds of guerrilla fighters of different nationalities in several training camps around Khartoum and Port Sudan. The Bashir military government has permitted the presence of such terrorist groups as the Palestinian Abu Nidal, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Lebanese Hezbollah, Egyptian Muslim militants and, of course, Bin Laden’s affiliates.

An opportunity to launch an attack arose in 1993--when the FBI and the CIA uncovered the involvement of Sudanese agents in the plans to attack tunnels and buildings in New York City following the bombing of the World Trade Center. But nothing was done at the time.

Now, whatever the motives are behind the timing, one thing is clear. The war against terrorism, especially that motivated by religious fanaticism, cannot be concluded with one operation. It can be neither limited in time nor confined to “show” strikes. Israeli experience has shown that “terrorist infrastructures” often consist of no more than a dozen tents and a few stores of explosives--as was the case with the Bin Laden compound. Even if these are accurately bombed, they can be quickly replaced.

The only military way to stop terrorists from regrouping is to neutralize their leaders. This is hard to do with missile attacks--especially if the leaders are expecting the strike and seek shelter underground or in caves, as Bin Laden did. Israel has assigned specially trained Mossad agents to liquidate leaders of deadly groups. But the CIA and other U.S. agencies are forbidden by Congress to use assassination as a weapon in the fight against political violence.

Thus the missile strikes are a double-edged sword. They send a clear message that the United States will not tolerate terrorism directed against its people and installations. But they also expose Americans to greater risks and threaten to turn U.S. soil into a war zone.