There is something exceedingly strange about America's war in Afghanistan. It appears to be a war that involves little in the way of real American combat. The reason is plain: combat implies casualties, and according to the reigning dogma, the American people are soft and sentimental, and cannot abide battlefield losses. Since Somalia, war without death seems to have become the American strategic ideal. This was nonsense then, and it is worse than nonsense now. After all, this war began with American deaths, with an obscene number of them, and all of them noncombatants. And yet the fiction endures among our soldiers and our statesmen.
"For the first time in our history," Vice President Cheney said on October 25, "we will probably suffer more casualties here at home in America than among our troops overseas." Look closely at that remark. It appears to be a statement of historical fact about September 11. But in truth it refers not to the past, but to the future. It is a coded promise that body bags will not be returned from the Hindu Kush, an assurance that few Americans will die abroad.
It is a completely spurious assurance, if our objective is victory. President Bush may not have explicitly ruled out the use of ground forces, as his predecessor stupidly did in Kosovo, but his conduct of the war has sent the same lulling message: the United States will not put large numbers of troops on the ground. And how does the president propose to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban without them? He is relying on three other military instruments: airpower, proxies, and Special Operations forces.
Two months since September 11, and one month since American bombing began, these three instruments have gotten us exactly nowhere. That is not surprising: they have seldom gotten us anywhere. Airpower certainly has a rather impressive record of failure, which the American military has regularly documented and regularly forgotten. From the Strategic Bombing Survey undertaken in the aftermath of the Second World War to the Gulf War Air Power Survey and similar analyses of the air war over Kosovo, the studies all tell the same story: bombing is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition, for battlefield victory. Every generation of American policymakers learns this lesson anew, but this generation's learning curve has proved steeper than most. The amazing technologies of stealth and precision guidance make the illusion almost irresistible.
Though it employed airpower with greater frequency than any other administration in recent memory, the proclaimed effectiveness of the Clinton administration's bombing campaigns in Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo was contrived and largely fanciful. In Iraq, eight years of intermittent bombing was merely a feckless cover for the benign neglect of Saddam Hussein's slow recovery from his defeat a decade ago. In Bosnia, it took a Croatian offensive to halt Serbia's depredations. In Kosovo, the ethnic cleansing did not end until Slobodan Milosevic was confronted with the threat of an imminent deployment of American ground forces.
If the innovation of the Clinton years was action in lieu of purpose, the result was to invite Americans--including the famously hard-boiled members of the Bush national security team--to wallow in the conceit that wars can be won bloodlessly and from a high altitude. The Clinton team prosecuted an entire war from 15,000 feet; and the Bush team is now fighting one from 16,000 feet. The Taliban, unfortunately, reside on the ground. And they show little sign of cracking under the fusillade from above. "I'm a bit surprised at how doggedly they are hanging on to power," a Pentagon spokesman conceded last week. Surprised? Like previous adversaries, the Taliban have adjusted cleverly and predictably to the air campaign, moving heavy weaponry into mosques and hunkering down in trenches and caves. Meanwhile footage of the regrettable, inevitable collateral damage that results from even the most precise of air campaigns is slowly overtaking the footage that really matters--the ruin of downtown Manhattan--and weakening the will of our already weak-willed allies. Having found refuge in places that America will not, or cannot, bomb, it appears the Taliban will rule Afghanistan through the winter, thereby handing the United States a humiliating and gratuitous defeat.
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