The political requirements of victory. (Essays).

Lustick, Ian S.

American-led military action in Afghanistan is, unfortunately, fully justified. The attacks of September 11 required recognition of the state of war that exists between the al-Qaeda organization and its allies and the American people. If our government did not seek to protect us against attacks, it would be failing in its most basic responsibility. The question is not whether to fight, but how.

President Bush has pronounced both law-enforcement and military strategies to achieve victory. First, protect the homeland by ramping up internal security against terrorists operating here already or traveling toward our shores. Second, destroy the machine that produced the New York and Washington attacks and will produce more like them. These are necessary steps, but they will fail unless accompanied by a dramatic escalation on the political front. If we do not transform American policy in and toward the Middle East, we will be unable to mobilize the governments, armies and police forces of the area to assist us in destroying the machine of terror. And, even if we do bribe or coerce these governments to help us, if we do not change the image of our country in the minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims, we will guarantee the rise of future al-Qaedas.

There is widespread recognition of the importance of the overt and covert relations of cooperation we have with Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia, and of the delicate diplomacy required for the maintenance of those relations. However, those in positions of leadership, those who guide American opinion and debate in the media, and of course the general public, are woefully, astonishingly, ignorant of just how large a political problem we face in the Middle East and how radical are the changes required in American foreign policy. The vastness of the nation's ignorance was blindingly apparent in George W. Bush's soliloquy, in which he genuinely wondered how it is that Americans could be so hated in the Muslim world when we are so manifestly good.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was afflicted by a resistance in Afghanistan so fierce that despite inflicting hundreds of thousands of fatalities on the Afghans, the Red Army was forced to withdraw. By aiding the Muslim resistance in Afghanistan, we helped produce the Soviet defeat. But by walking away from Afghanistan after the war, we directly contributed to the Afghanistan we have today.

Again we want to subsidize and train Afghans to fight for the Afghanistan that we currently need. We have funded, trained and armed the fractious "Northern Alliance" to fight with us against the Taliban. We search for bribable tribal leaders among the Pushtuns, supporters among ambitious Afghan expatriates and long-suffering refugees, even among "moderates" within the Taliban. But regardless of how narrow or broadly based is the regime that arises after our military victory, the question will be posed, as it was after the victory of "our" Afghans over the Soviets: What will become of the regime after we leave? The most likely scenario is that this regime, as weak as Afghan governments traditionally are, will face the fury of millions of still desperately poor and humiliated Muslims, not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan as well -- a country whose current government has poor prospects of surviving a large scale American-led war on its borders.

To achieve the destruction of the terror machine and to prevent its reconstruction, we must convince Afghans, Pakistanis and most Muslim Middle Eastemers that we are not their enemy; that we are prepared to live with governments produced by democratic elections, even if they are Islamic governments; and that we will use the full resources of our country to achieve a rapid, comprehensive and just peace between Israel and the Palestinians. In other words, we need a fundamentally new approach to the Middle East and the Muslim world in general. Small-scale economic recovery programs or new spins on traditional policies are simply not enough. Without a comprehensive economic and political program of social reconstruction for wherever it is that we fight, and without American enforcement of a just and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, we are doomed to suffer a fate similar to that we helped inflict on the Soviet Union.

One might think that the Palestinian question is peripheral to the struggle against al-Qaeda and war in Afghanistan. Certainly the groups that carried out the September 11 attacks did not do so for the specific purpose of "liberating Palestine" or removing settlements from the West Bank and Gaza. But that is not the point. The great significance of this issue lies in the way that a steady diet of images of Israeli oppression of Palestinians and American collusion in that oppression creates conditions among the masses that assure the terrorists of sympathy and support. No matter how barbaric the terrorists' actions, when they occur against a backdrop of perceived U.S. partnership with Israel in the annexation of Jerusalem, the killing of Palestinians and the suppression of Palestinian nationalism, they will at some level produce sentiments of satisfaction that redound to the political benefit of the terrorists. That is what accounts for Bin Laden's sudden emphasis on the Palestine question and why it overshadows the Kashmir and other issues in his public appeals.

The overwhelming majority of Middle Easterners were, of course, horrified by the images of destruction of the World Trade Center they saw on their television screens. But the images that have dominated those screens for years, and especially this past year, have been of Israeli soldiers and pilots, using American weapons and American aid to confiscate Palestinian Arab land, build Israeli settlements on that land, kill Palestinian militants, uproot Palestinian olive trees and destroy Palestinian homes, offices and economic assets. To American ears this litany of "crimes" sounds jarring and strident, but to Middle Easterners this is a list of obvious outrages, matched only by the outrage felt toward Washington's tolerance of them.

Bin Laden and his henchmen attack the United States for what we are. We base our strength, indeed our very identity, on our toleration of difference, our pluralism, our liberty to think of God and man as it seems worthy to us, as individual human beings, to do so. They seek to drive us into a "clash of civilizations" with Islam. We hold out hope for a world of civilized differences. Indeed aside from the military and political sources of their opposition to America, they also seek, through terror, to combat the gravitational pull that American economic prosperity, cultural creativity and freedom exert on hundreds of millions of Muslims. They seek, in other words, not only to rid the Muslim world of regimes they despise and re-establish an Islamic empire under their own fanatical leadership, but also to destroy the attractiveness of liberal democracy by putting us on display as panicky, cowardly and unwilling to pay the costs of fighting for what we believe.

Al-Qaeda opposes us for what we are. Who we are makes us the target they want to hit. But whether we get hit, and how hard, depends on how we fight. They have carefully prepared the ground to hit us where we are most vulnerable, exploiting the openness of our society and our association with the deepest, rawest source of contemporary humiliation in the Arab/Muslim world -- Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. In our policies in the Middle East, we have played to their strengths with our weaknesses, by standing behind regimes that refuse democracy to law-abiding Islamist parties and by an almost thoughtless policy of toleration and political protection of Israeli-government settlement construction and repression in the West Bank and Gaza.

When Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage was asked recently whether Washington would address the political grievances of Arabs and Muslims against the United States in addition to prosecuting the war against terrorism, Armitage responded fiercely: "You are playing on Osama Bin Laden's court," he told the stunned reporter. "I won't play on that court. And I advise you not to do so."

If this rebuke by Armitage becomes representative of Washington's attitudes toward a real "reassessment" of U.S. policies in the area, we may enjoy a victory in the battle against the terrorists, but the war will certainly not be won. Public opinion in Israel is hawkish and angry, although it also favors a Palestinian state solution and is terrified of a split between the Jewish state and the United States. Israeli opinion leaders are very aware of the window of opportunity that the American administration has to use national-security imperatives to trump the influence of the Israel lobby. Just as it took very little in the way of contingent loan guarantees, under the Bush-Baker administration, to switch Israeli voters from Shamir to Rabin in 1992, so now it will take much less than it might seem for public American policy moves to shove Israeli political life in a much more productive direction than that taken by the Sharon government. Without putting our commitment to Israel's existence and security in doubt, we must re-establish our bona fides on the Palestinian question, replacing our image as "Israel's lawyer" with that of a superpower taking the long view of what is necessary for a lasting peace in the region.

We must also do the even more difficult job of encouraging Muslims to believe they can succeed politically to reshape their societies with ballots, rather than bullets. The Iranian experience demonstrates that even the most virulently anti-American and most extreme sort of fundamentalist Islam, coming to power in a revolution rather than through constitutional means, eventually will moderate its position toward us and develop political movements anxious to find a way to normalize its domestic political life and its external relations. We must put away our fears of the governments that would arise in Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and elsewhere if truly free elections were to take place. We must tell the leaders we are dealing with in those and other Muslim countries, including Pakistan, that we are working with them now against a common threat and will support every effort they make to protect their post-war domestic positions. But we should also make clear that those positions will not be able to be sustained by corruption, secret police and fraudulent or rigged elections. This is a longer-term challenge and one that will require extraordinarily deft diplomacy. But now we can at least begin to speak the language of democracy, even in the Middle East.

As the "greatest generation" fought the heroic fight in Europe and Japan against fascism, so President Bush suggests this generation must now go forth to do the same in the Middle East. The national imagination sees U.S. special forces, backed by brave Muslim freedom fighters, finding and destroying al-Qaeda's bases, killing Bin Laden and his henchmen, and then returning home to a victorious and relieved country, albeit a country stripped of its illusion of invulnerability. But we must remember that our victory over fascism in both Western Europe and Japan was followed and consolidated by a massive program of aid in the reconstruction of European democracy and the foundation of Japanese democracy. Without that great political, moral and economic effort, Soviet-backed communist regimes might well have supplanted democracy in many more European countries and in Japan. Our soldiers and our murdered citizens in New York, Washington and that field in Pennsylvania will have died in vain if we do not match the victory of our arms in Afghanistan with the same kinds of resources, political support and respect for our Muslim allies and their deeply held beliefs that we showed not only to our allies in post-war Europe, but toward our former enemies as well.