Yes, we are winning the war on terrorism. And another terrorist attack could come at any minute.
That’s the discordant message from top government officials, one year after the attacks that triggered the war. And Americans offer the same assessment.
Three in four Americans say the war on terrorism is going well, according to several July polls.
Yet, the same polls show that most Americans expect other attacks here and don’t believe that the government can do much to prevent them.
“I don’t think there’s any winning to it,” said Mary Phillips, 47, who raises chickens near Lewes, Del. “Killing Osama bin Laden won’t end it. There will just be a new fundamentalist. We can’t kill them all.”
The major achievement so far is the ongoing military campaign in Afghanistan, which disrupted al-Qaida, the terrorist network believed responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Gannett News Service in an interview.
“That’s not the end of it. That’s only the beginning,” he said. “A lot of what comes next will be a lot less visible, a lot less glamorous, but no less important.”
America’s new war has used only a fraction of the military manpower that a more traditional war would require. A few thousand troops are stationed in Afghanistan — fewer than were sent to Utah for the Winter Olympics — and a few hundred were sent to the Philippines and Georgia to train soldiers in those countries. The number of service members who fought against the Taliban in Afghanistan was about one-hundredth of the number who fought in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, according to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
As defined by the Bush administration, victory in America’s new war means finding and eliminating any terrorist organization with a global reach. By that measure, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reminded members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 31, America is “still closer to the beginning than to the end.”
But he added, “What a difference a year makes.”
Since Sept. 11:
• About 70 nations have joined the war on terrorism. Some share intelligence, some seize terrorist funds, others have provided troops.
• The Taliban, which harbored bin Laden, have been banished from power in Afghanistan, though they are still in the region.
• About 2,400 possible terrorists have been detained and interviewed around the world, including 500 “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba. Information provided by some detainees has yielded additional arrests, including that of Jose Padilla, accused of planning a “dirty bomb” attack.
• Law enforcement agencies foiled planned terrorist attacks on the U.S. Embassy and American corporate offices in Singapore.
• Italian police arrested Moroccan terrorists who had developed a lethal cyanide compound and who had almost finished digging a tunnel into the U.S. Embassy in Rome.
• A terrorist group in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf, was all but destroyed by Filipino forces with the help of about 850 U.S. troops. The leader of the group was killed in June. Bush administration officials say the group was linked to al-Qaida.
But the list of military successes does not include the death or capture of bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and a critical target — symbolically and tactically — in the war on terrorism.
And the State Department’s list of international terrorist groups seems to grow almost daily. The list now includes 33 such groups, most composed of Muslim extremists.
New “terror alerts” have become almost routine, along with announcements of new precautions — added security at the Golden Gate Bridge, a ban on trucks near the White House, a general warning to the Seattle area. The alerts have passed without incident. But that’s not victory.
“The biggest mistake,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, “would be to take the absence of a sensational, and horribly devastating attack on the United States in the past 11 months as evidence we are ’winning.”’
The next target in the war on terrorism is likely to be Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Americans — including members of the Bush administration — disagree on whether invading Iraq is justified. Those who support an invasion say Saddam has developed biological and chemical weapons and will use them unless America stops him.
“There’s no question he must be considered a target in the war on terror,” said former Reagan administration defense official Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy.
Conservatives such as Gaffney argue that Saddam has played a major role in international terror and probably had some part in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Others argue that attacking Iraq would reinforce the impression within the Muslim world that the United States is a belligerent bully with a bias against Islam.
“Would such a war increase or decrease resentment of U.S. policy in the Arab and Muslim world, where perpetrators of the tragic events of September 11 came from?” asked Mustapha K. Al-Sayyid, a Cairo University professor of political science and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Efforts to woo foreign countries to adopt a more pro-American attitude have mostly failed. One State Department poll this year showed that 88 percent of Saudis and 82 percent of Jordanians have a favorable opinion of bin Laden, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
“I think the important thing for us to focus on is not a global popularity contest but on whether we have the political support we need to obtain the objectives we need,” Bolton told GNS. “I’d love it if the whole world carried American flags instead of burning them, but it’s not a realistic objective.”
The forces that help fuel anti-American terrorism — radical Islamic schools, diatribes by imams, religious texts that denounce Americans as infidels — continue to thrive in parts of the Islamic world. So do corruption, repression and humiliation — social conditions that make terrorism an attractive option, said Stanford’s Diamond.
“Until we address these fundamental political, ideological, and social drivers and infrastructures of terror, we are not going to come close to victory,” he said. “At best, we will be like the gardener who keeps cutting the weeds at the surface and leaving the roots to spring back to life.”
