New Sense of Impatience Is Emerging

Patience.

That was the plaintive word Friday from Bush administration officials on all fronts as they sought to explain disappointing developments in the struggle against anthrax at home and the Taliban in Afghanistan. “The American people are going to have to be patient, just like we are,” President Bush insisted in a speech.

But perhaps for the first time since Sept. 11, patience seemed to be eroding. “There are some questions lurking around for certain,” said one Democratic senator, who asked not to be identified.

At the Pentagon, the military faced increasingly skeptical questions about the progress of the campaign to dislodge the Taliban, especially after Friday’s reports that a key opposition leader had been caught and executed.

At the White House, Office of Homeland Security Director Thomas J. Ridge faced sharpening concern about the administration’s handling of the anthrax threat. As new revelations brought the terror-by-mail scare into the CIA, the State Department and the Supreme Court, the anthrax strain on Washington seemed to be gaining more ground than Afghanistan’s opposition Northern Alliance.

Although few elected officials have been willing to criticize the administration publicly on either the domestic or foreign front, it appears that pressure for greater progress is building on both. “I believe we need to turn the heat up,” Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said earlier this week. He was speaking specifically about the military campaign against the Taliban. But his words expressed a widespread private view about the government response to the anthrax danger as well.

A Series of Setbacks

The magnitude of the challenge seemed to expand almost by the day this week--and officials plainly scrambled to catch up. Public health officials acknowledged they were caught off guard by indications that anthrax apparently was released in postal facilities, even though the suspect letters were sealed. In an extraordinary admission, Postmaster General John Potter said he could not guarantee the safety of the mail. From the podium at the White House, Ridge almost daily has struggled to reconcile mixed messages about the nature of the anthrax threat, particularly whether the spores involved in the letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) carried evidence of being chemically altered or prepared in a foreign lab.

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials conceded the Taliban was proving more dogged than expected and commanders of the Northern Alliance acknowledged that their hopes of a significant advance in northern Afghanistan had been severely set back by a Taliban counterattack.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld turned heads further in an interview with USA Today by admitting he was uncertain whether the U.S. would ever capture Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Though he later expressed slightly more optimism, Rumsfeld still said the search was “like [looking for] a needle in a haystack.”

By Friday, at the daily Pentagon news briefing, reporters were asking Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem to explain why the U.S. was dropping such a relatively small number of bombs each day and whether the campaign in Afghanistan was “bogged down.” The questions were the most pointed the Pentagon has faced since the war began almost three weeks ago, and it reflected a broader tremor of uneasiness in Washington.

“I don’t know if anxiety is the right word, but there’s some frustration,” said the senator who asked not to be identified. “There’s some kind of sense of, ‘Oh, oh, is this the same old strategy of trying to do it all from the air?’ ”

Such questions have been building for more than a week, primarily among foreign policy hawks who fear the administration has overly restrained the air campaign. Mostly, those critics on the right have muted the volume on their dissent. But that critique received its most public airing Friday when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), in an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, complained that the war was being fought with “half measures.”

Almost precisely reprising his criticism of President Clinton during the 1999 Kosovo war, McCain argued that the U.S. needs to step up the air war against the Taliban and consider the use of ground troops. “We shouldn’t fight this war in increments,” McCain wrote. “The Taliban and their terrorist allies are indeed tough fighters. They’ll need to experience a more impressive display of American firepower before they contemplate surrender.”

In the long run, few doubt the capacity of the U.S. military to dislodge the Taliban. But at the moment, many analysts say, the war effort seems caught in a Catch-22. Most outside analysts believe the administration has sought to restrain the pace of the war against Taliban forces until it can assemble a coalition to govern Afghanistan if they fall. But progress in building such a coalition has been achingly slow. “It is turning out to be much harder than anybody imagined,” said James B. Steinberg, former deputy national security advisor to Clinton.

Amid the unsettled political situation, Northern Alliance officials openly are complaining that the U.S. bombing campaign has been far too meager. “If it is done the same way, [the war] is going to be prolonged more than weeks,” Abdullah, the Northern Alliance’s foreign minister who goes by a single name, said Friday.

Rebel Force Not Living Up to Expectations

Yet many U.S. analysts are equally disenchanted with the military performance of the Northern Alliance. “They don’t seem to be as capable as we thought they would be and they don’t seem to be moving as rapidly as we hoped,” said Kim Holmes, director of international studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The bottom line may be that, with each passing day, quick breakthroughs in Afghanistan appear increasingly unlikely. That seems to be the message in the struggle against terrorism at home too, as investigators try to find the authors of the anthrax attack and even to define the full boundaries of the threat. At some briefings from Ridge and other officials, the most common words may have been: “I don’t know.”

Echoing McCain’s critique of the war abroad, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) this week said flatly that the government had “failed” by not ordering more rapid anthrax testing at a Washington postal facility where two workers have since died.

These criticisms may signal the beginning of the end of the virtually uncritical unity Bush has enjoyed since Sept. 11. Still, the tone of any dissent is being restrained by the bipartisan understanding that in the war on terrorism the nation faces challenges different from any it ever has faced.

In that uncertain environment, the president is bound to receive the benefit of more than a little patience. But the questions that crystallized this week suggest that patience won’t be limitless.