A Cowering United States Gives Terrorism a Free Ride

After 85 court sessions and nearly $90 million in legal costs, one Libyan underling has been found innocent of the destruction of Pan American Flight 103, and another insignificant underling, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, has been found guilty. The other thing that the trial proved was the utter futility of responding to terrorism with the ordinary procedures of criminal justice. Col. Moammar Kadafi, the Libyan ruler, could not even be interrogated, let alone arrested and convicted. Yet it is evident that if Megrahi did it, he was acting under orders as a mere agent of Kadafi, who controls everything in Libya but the weather.

A vast and costly intelligence effort was made to find legally valid evidence for the trial. Those resources would have been better used for substantive intelligence against today’s international terrorism, much of it imputed to one man: Osama bin Laden, along with his al Qaeda organization.

Bin Laden’s latest achievement was last month’s abrupt closure of the U.S. Embassy in Rome in response to threats received or detected. The closure caused an uproar in Italy, which is justly proud of its police forces and of its record in preventing terrorism. The Via Veneto building, moreover, is easily secured. Naked fear caused the closure.

Even when operating normally, U.S. embassies have become beleaguered fortresses of difficult access for visitors. In Berlin, the construction of the new American Embassy was held up for months because the U.S. State Department demanded an inordinately large safety zone around the building that city planners could not accommodate. U.S. facilities worldwide are now on permanent alert against terrorist attacks. Since the devastating attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen, the port visits of Navy ships have been further restricted.

Bin Laden resides in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda has its training camps. Although it is certainly a vast and difficult country full of warriors, Afghanistan has no air defense perimeter, so any aircraft can fly in and out unmolested, and no guards or patrols along its land borders, except at a few road passages.

The United States maintains a vast, very costly panoply of Special Operations forces, totaling about 29,000 in uniform, not counting reserves. They include several elite battalions that can be airlifted in special long-range intruder aircraft, stealthy boats and submarines.

U.S. Special Operations forces are far larger and far better equipped than their foreign counterparts, which employ their forces whenever they can, notably for counter-terrorism. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, has been reluctant to allow any combat missions at all. Each time an operation is proposed, they demand exhaustive feasibility studies, impose the most restrictive preconditions and demand assurances from the planners that no casualties will be suffered. The final result is that almost invariably the operation is canceled.

An egregious example was Operation Amber Star, in which the objective was the capture and delivery for trial of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the political and military wartime chiefs, respectively, of the Bosnian Serbs, and both accused war criminals. Ostensibly a NATO operation, it was actually controlled by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With the support of the National Security Agency for remote surveillance, the Balkans Task Force of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and U.S. marshals (specialists in conveying prisoners), the Special Operations Command was given the task of preparing a minutely detailed plan, along with the British director of Special Forces, whose SAS commandos were to take part. Although Karadzic only had a few bodyguards (Mladic lived in Belgrade), the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted on “overwhelming force” to minimize the risk of casualties. After almost two years and many millions of dollars, in 1988 the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused to authorize the mission. Mladic and Karadzic remain at liberty.

U.S. commando forces have costly special air, sea and land vehicles, the best weapons, countless fancy gadgets but very little combat experience. The irony of excessive prudence is that on the very few occasions when those forces are employed, as in the 1993 Mogadishu raid, things go wrong, and very brave, highly skilled men are killed, ultimately by the collective inexperience of their commanders.

If the threat of terrorism warrants intense worldwide precautions that impose high monetary costs, endless inconvenience and major political embarrassment, it should also warrant some attempts at preemption. Terrorists are elusive by definition and certainly not easily found. But U.S. intelligence agencies have no great incentive to precisely locate Bin Laden or his henchmen because, even if they can find them, the terrorists are bound to disappear again long before the Joint Chiefs of Staff approves even a feasibility study.

Commando actions are not full-scale wars, campaigns or even offensives. They should not be subject to the same precautionary safeguards. For one thing, unlike D-Day or Operation Desert Storm, they can usually be recalled if unexpected risks emerge, and the small number of troops engaged limits the number of possible casualties. The very purpose of Special Operations forces is to carry out operations too complex and demanding for regular line forces. Because they do not serve as deterrence, they are useless unless used. Action entails the risk of failure and of casualties. If only zero-defects, zero-casualties operations are authorized, none will be.

If the Joint Chiefs of Staff will only allow cruise missile strikes that risk no casualties but which are useless against elusive terrorist targets--and the new Bush administration does not intervene to order otherwise--the Special Operations Command might as well be disbanded.

Meanwhile, as the United States does nothing to threaten him--leaving him free to threaten--Osama Bin Laden has become the hero and role model of countless potential terrorists.