Retaliation Rife With Risks, Hard Choices

The attack on the United States placed intense pressure on the Bush administration Tuesday to expand the war on terrorism from its focus on individual cells to broader campaigns against nations that harbor terrorist organizations.

President Bush suggested such a shift is already underway, telling the nation in his Oval Office address, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

U.S. intelligence agencies believe Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sudan continue to harbor terrorist groups, while North Korea, Libya and Syria have moderated their practices. Still other countries are unwelcome hosts to terrorists because they do not have full control over their lands.

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi dissident U.S. officials strongly suspect is behind Tuesday’s attacks, operates from camps in Afghanistan and his organization also has cells in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Regardless of which terrorist group is ultimately found responsible, international security experts said Tuesday’s attack demands a much more sophisticated and stronger response than the surgical retaliations of the recent past.

“We have to stop thinking about this as cops and robbers and start thinking about it as a war,” said Eliot Cohen, professor of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins Center for Advanced International Studies.

It may be months or years for the United States to determine precisely who orchestrated the attacks, strategic analysts said. Rather than waiting to make a precise response to those terrorists, the United States should begin actions against the nations that foster them.

“Once we’ve determined where these attacks originated from, I would not be surprised to see a reaction that was warlike,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. Such retaliation might include bombing in major cities and attacks on material assets of countries considered friendly to terrorists.

In the past, the United States has prefaced most military actions with diplomatic initiatives to enlist the support of allies. The Bush administration is certain to work through diplomatic channels in this case too, although the pressure in this country for a strong military response may test the limits of U.S. patience.

Former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger declared that “there’s only one way to deal with people like this--that’s to kill some of them. They need to be hit.”

In an interview with CNN, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger said the attack “is comparable to Pearl Harbor. And we must have the same response, and the people who did it must have the same end as the people who attacked Pearl Harbor.”

Others used even stronger language. Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter-terrorism official, declared that “Bin Laden’s awakened people to the need to use weapons not used before--including nuclear weapons--on Afghanistan.”

“You don’t launch a few missiles and make them craters and expect the problem to go away,” Johnson said. If the United States doesn’t respond forcefully, “the U.S. will be seen as unable to fight.”

Thompson said attacks in New York might have taken the lives of “as many people in New York today as we lost in all of the entire Korean War. The only way to prevent this in the future is to do what the terrorists did to demonstrate the consequences. We need a huge show of force that involves huge loss of material assets and lots of casualties.”

Cohen agreed. “If you call it a war, it means you have fewer compunctions about killing them,” he said. “It means you may well do things that may well involve collateral damage and hurting civilians. It means that you don’t simply think about going after a particular perpetrator of a particular crime, but that what we’re going to do is look for some broad political effects, like convincing the Syrians, for example, that they really should not support or tolerate any of the people or organizations that support doing these kinds of things.”

But William Kincade, a professor of international relations at the American University School of International Service, was skeptical that the Bush administration would change the strategy of targeted retaliation that has marked U.S. policy against terrorists in the past.

“They’ll probably just keep up the retaliation, counter-retaliation that’s gone on between the U.S. and much of the Arab world for the last couple of decades,” Kincade said. “They don’t know that it doesn’t work. That’s exactly the thing that they don’t understand.”

Most of those efforts have consisted of air strikes that carry little risk for U.S. military personnel. But as the Clinton administration discovered, it is difficult to deter Bin Laden with surgical strikes at his network. The organization is widely dispersed, and, unlike a foreign power, it doesn’t have the physical infrastructure or the military hardware, such as tank divisions and air defense batteries, that are prime targets for an air campaign.

Also, as the suicide attacks demonstrated Tuesday, the members of terrorist organizations are often so strongly motivated that a counterattack may even strengthen their resolve.

“The risk is, [Bin Laden] could bounce up in a few days, unhurt, and make the United States look like a paper tiger,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former National Security Council official.

Added one ranking defense official from the Clinton administration: “Like so many things, this is a lot harder than it sounds.”

After the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, the United States learned how difficult it can be to effectively strike back at Bin Laden. The military launched several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at Bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan, knocking down some crude buildings but missing Bin Laden and his lieutenants. It also struck a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that officials believe was tied to Bin Laden, though it never fully convinced some U.S. allies that the link was real.

The 1998 air strike also created an unforeseen backlash about the use of cruise missiles exclusively in a retaliatory strike. The missiles, which cost $1 million apiece, are unmanned and are typically fired from hundreds of miles away--at no risk to U.S. military personnel. “Politically, they’ve gotten a bad name,” Pollack said. “If you just fire a bunch of cruise missiles it looks halfhearted.”

A Pentagon strike probably would be more deadly if carried out by manned aircraft carrying cluster bombs and other antipersonnel munitions that are more effective against the foot soldiers of terrorism.

But to send manned aircraft into Afghanistan to strike at Bin Laden, the United States would have to decide whether it wanted to try to win overflight permission from the Pakistani government, which has had ties to the Taliban. Any U.S. strikes could draw complaints from some quarters--most likely the Russians, Chinese and French--which are sensitive to perceived U.S. “unilateralism.”

In the face of calls for a swift U.S. response, a leading voice from the previous administration advised caution. Former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said that “a little more time is necessary” to determine whether Bin Laden was, indeed, the culprit.