Updates from AIJAC

Lessons from Afghanistan / Anthrax evidence

Today, Updates features two pieces drawing some lessons from the successful US-led campaign to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan. Professor Barry Rubin, Deputy Director of the BESA Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, points out that expectations of action in the name of Arab and Muslim solidarity have been disappointed again, for the nth time, and that it should be recognised that prediction based on this concept are based on a mistaken understanding of Middle Eastern politics. And distinguished American academic Fareed Zakharia writes that, despite the sceptics, it has been proven that modern airpower is remarkably effective.

Finally, Updates reproduces a report from the latest Economist with new revelations from Kabul that an organisation associated with one of Pakistan's top nuclear scientists was apparently attempting to build an anthrax bomb launched from a helium balloon. Since the article appeared, the scientist mentioned, Bashiruddin Mahmood, and another high-level colleague have reportedly been re-arrested for having allegedly dispensed expertise in weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban.

THE REGION: Wishful winning

By Barry Rubin

Jerusalem Post, November, 28 2001

Victories matter. Events in Afghanistan have once again overturned certain myths about Middle East politics.

Since history shows that these myths or misconceptions reassert themselves very quickly, let's enjoy the brief period in which what should be obvious is apparent to almost everyone.

One of the most enduring misunderstandings about Middle East politics is that Arab and Muslim solidarity dictates the actions, rather than just the words, of states and peoples. In this case, the outpouring of anti-Americanism throughout the Arab world and the enthusiasm for many of the ideas - though not partisan interests - of Osama bin Ladin made it seem as if a US assault on Afghanistan would be met by a massive uprising from Morocco's Atlantic coast to the shores of the Persian Gulf.

In fact, nobody in the region did much of anything in response. There were probably more participants in "anti-American" demonstrations in the US than in the Arab world.

Why?

One key reason is that there is little actual support for Bin Laden and his allied groups.

Another is that Arab regimes usually didn't permit such marches, if only because of their effect internationally. The Palestinian Authority suppressed public displays of backing for Bin Ladin with armed force.

Yet there is another, more profound reason for the passivity that has met US actions. It is a very simple and normal human one: wanting to be on the winning side - or at least not on the losing one.

This is by no means the first time the phenomenon has occurred, and perhaps it should be remembered for next time.

Ten years ago, when Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, Saddam Hussein seemed set to become the Arab world's hero and leader. There was literally not a single Palestinian intellectual or activist, in both public and private, who did not seem swept up in this expectation. In the West many warned that any move to fight Iraq would lead to a massive outbreak of support for the Iraqi dictator.

When five American Middle East experts were invited to meet President George Bush, four of them predicted that the US-led coalition would break up the moment the battle began. These claims proved completely wrong.

Ten years before that, in 1980, when Iran's revolution was fresh and popular at home, those who claimed to know insisted that Islamist revolt would sweep the Middle East. That required ignoring the divides between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, and between Arabs and Persians. True, Sunni Muslims came up with their own versions of the movement which didn't necessarily pay allegiance to Ayatollah Khomeini; and Islamist radical movements did become the main opposition groups throughout the region. There was much violence and a couple of civil wars.

But once again, there was not a single successful Islamist revolution in the Arab world. The great majority of Muslims did not accept the Islamist claim to represent the proper religious interpretation. Government repression also persuaded many that the insurgents would not win.

Ten years before that, it was the turn of revolutionary groups who had combined neo-Marxist slogans, guerrilla warfare tactics, rhetoric about people's revolution, anti-Americanism and other doctrines. Yet such strategies did not destroy Israel; and the Jordanian army, supposedly backing a "reactionary" monarchy doomed to disappear, flattened the PLO's challenge in a few days. The masses did not rise and the Arab world did not unite on behalf of nationalist socialist revolution.

Ten years before that, in the early 1960s, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser made the most impressive effort ever to unite the Arab world against the West. In this case, powerful movements did arise in various countries, and military coups were staged in the name of pan-Arabism.

Yet Egypt's army couldn't even defeat a rag-tag force made up of brother Arabs in Yemen to bring about revolutionary unity there. In Syria, the short-lived United Arab Republic collapsed in the face of a military coup.

Each time the same arguments were made in the West: that Arab anger was exploding because of just grievances, that the regional crisis was America's fault, that Israel was the only real problem, and that disaster would ensue unless the Arabs were given exactly the outcome they wanted.

EACH TIME, Arab leaders and intellectuals rushed to explain that their own world view and strategies were quite correct. The only problem was that they weren't fighting hard enough, were beset by "traitors" at home, and merely needed to adjust their ideology to the latest fad.

Often, another key element in their argument was to believe that ideology and unity would overcome power and weapons. A constant feature was an underestimation of the adversary - whether the US, Israel or someone else - based on wishful thinking.

That is why the September 11 attack assumed such tremendous importance. It could be taken as evidence - at last - that the Americans could be defeated by a willingness for self-sacrifice and by steadfastness. Another way of putting it is that the US could be frightened into changing its Middle East policy: A compromise peace with Israel would not be necessary because total victory was still attainable.

In the eras described above, there were many similar statements by the Nasserists, PLO, Khomeini and Saddam Hussein, along with their supporters and throughout the Middle East.

In the Arabs' case, there were always brave dissenters as well as others (sometimes the majority) who doubted the latest scheme would work, but said nothing out of fear for their lives or careers.

Most important of all, there were some leaders who knew better in their own minds and acted more pragmatically than they talked. Even so, in the end, the Arabs always paid in life, treasure and foiled objectives for these mistaken enthusiasms.

Obviously, something is wrong with the way many in the West have interpreted the Middle East, and with the way many Arabs have interpreted the West.

Isn't it time to rethink these conceptions?

I hope this is the last time we will have to go through this, but somehow I doubt it. Maybe save this column for the next round of a seemingly endless game.

Air Power Works

By Fareed Zakaria

Washington Post, Wednesday, November 28, 2001

Over the past decade, every time the United States has engaged in a strategic bombing campaign it has achieved its goals -- think of the Persian Gulf War, the Bosnian air campaign (which persuaded Slobodan Milosevic to sign the Dayton accords), Kosovo and Afghanistan. And after each war, experts and journalists have emphasized that the central lesson of the operation is . . . air power doesn't work. With the Taliban in ruins and U.S. allies in control of three-quarters of Afghanistan, expect to start hearing arguments about how our victory had little to do with bombing.

In this view, U.S. military campaigns over the past decade are all optical illusions. What look like victories produced by air power were really -- with some creative interpretation -- victories from the ground. You might think this is a difficult case to make. Yet consider the lead essay in the current issue of International Security, the premier journal of national security studies. The author, professor Daryl Press, explains that in the Gulf War, 38 days of heavy bombing -- which destroyed command bunkers, bridges, telephone exchanges, power plants, supply lines and tens of thousands of troops -- had little effect on Iraq's military. But four days of scattered ground combat crushed the Iraqi army and persuaded it to surrender.

This is not so different from the argument made about the Kosovo campaign. NATO flew 37,465 sorties, relentlessly destroying every major military, industrial and communications site in Serbia. But if you thought this was what made Milosevic fold, you're wrong. Soon after the war, commentators decided that it was a couple of phrases that Bill Clinton muttered about the possibility of ground troops that did the trick. Who knew that words could be so powerful?

A few weeks into the current campaign the skeptics began their drumbeat. Air power never works, Afghanistan is ill-suited for it, it has strengthened the Taliban politically, etc. Then came the Taliban's near-total collapse. But it turns out that this one also was a result not of the weeks of lethal bombing but of the few special operations, conducted by a couple of hundred soldiers (most of whom were actually helping guide the bombing, but never mind). And, of course, pride of place now goes to the fearless Northern Alliance, the indispensable force on the ground. (The alliance was often walking into abandoned towns from which the Taliban had fled, but never mind that, either.) A strategy that was 100 percent wrong, with a few tweaks -- some special operations and a little more bombing -- turned out to be 100 percent right.

It's time to face facts. U.S. air power today is our decisive weapon of war. Obviously it must be used with other forces, and some things you can only do from the ground, as Monday's deployment of Marines makes clear. But the combination of the information revolution and precision munitions has produced a quantum leap in air power's lethality and effectiveness. William Owens, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explains the transformation. "The key instruments that make us so powerful from the air are global positioning systems, laser guidance, detailed maps, radar, J-Stars, moving target indicators. All of these give you information -- really, knowledge. What sets the United States apart from its adversaries is that we use information much better than they do. Properly used, that can be an unbridgeable gap."

And in many ways this is only the beginning. "Strategic bombing could be much more effective," Owens explains. "Imagine an integrated network of sensors that made us see the entire battlefield all the time and a military that was totally interconnected at all times. If we had such a system now, finding Osama bin Laden would be easy."

Many in the defense establishment are still trapped by the lessons of Vietnam and World War II -- in which dumb bombs were largely ineffective. Bureaucratic and political support for old-fashioned systems of power projection remains strong. And nostalgia for land power is still widespread. That's why Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's attempts to transform the military along the lines Owens advocates were killed by the permanent defense establishment.

One of the main reasons air power is constantly scoffed at -- even as it succeeds in test after test -- is that many people believe that the limited, precise targeting we are moving toward isn't really war. The chief criticism of the Afghan campaign was that it was not lethal enough. "Why aren't we carpet-bombing troops?" we were asked. But carpet-bombing has never been very effective; otherwise Vietnam would have been a thundering success. The better the information you have, the fewer bombs you need to hit a target. During Desert Storm it would take, on average, 10 bombs to hit one target. In the Afghan campaign it took about two bombs to hit a target. The point in war is to achieve your objective, not have a fireworks display.

The unease about antiseptic warfare goes beyond bombing itself. Throughout this war, commentators have worried that by not using ground troops we were making war too easy, losing the sense of struggle and sacrifice that are essential to its pursuit. But while there is something to this impulse, surely if America can achieve its objectives without placing too many of its soldiers in harm's way, it would be crazy to do anything else. Certainly if my son were in the military I would like him to have every tool necessary to make him as effective as possible. And this impulse is not new thinking at all. Remember the words of Gen. George S. Patton (paraphrased by George C. Scott): "You don't win the war by dying for your country. You win the war by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."

The writer is editor of Newsweek International and a columnist for Newsweek.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

ANTHRAX

Chilling evidence in the ruins of Kabul

Economist, Nov. 22, 2001

AMERICAN officials increasingly believe the anthrax attacks since September 11th were not carried out by people connected to al-Qaeda, but may have been the work of a lone American madman. To avert future attacks, though, perhaps they should look harder.

They might start, for example, in a nondescript house in the wealthiest district of Kabul, where a Pakistani NGO called Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN) once had its offices. UTN's president is Bashiruddin Mahmood, one of Pakistan's leading nuclear scientists and a specialist in plutonium technology. Last month Mr Mahmood was arrested by the Pakistani authorities and interrogated on his links to the Taliban, with whom he has had frequent contact for, he insists, humanitarian reasons. Mr Mahmood was released again soon afterwards. The Taliban has denied any "abnormal" links between Mr Mahmood and Mr bin Laden, and he himself says he has never met the man.

In public, UTN helped Afghans with flourmills, school textbooks and road-upgrading schemes. But its offices suggest that this may have been a cover for something far more sinister. According to their neighbours, the Pakistanis who lived and worked there fled Kabul along with the Taliban, but the evidence they left behind suggests that they were working on a plan to build an anthrax bomb.

An upstairs room of the house had been used as a workshop. What appeared to be a Russian rocket had been disassembled, and a canister labelled "helium" had been left on the worktop. On the floor were multiple copies of documents about anthrax downloaded from the Internet, and details about the American army's vaccination plans for its troops. The number of copies suggests that seminars were also taking place there.

One of the downloaded documents featured a small picture of the former American defence secretary, William Cohen, holding a five-pound bag of sugar. It noted that he was doing this "to show the amount of the biological weapon anthrax that could destroy half the population of Washington, DC."

On the floor was a small bag of white powder, which this correspondent decided not to inspect. It may have contained nothing more deadly than icing sugar, but that could be useful for experiments in how to scatter powder containing anthrax spores from a great height over a city, or to show students how to do this. The living room contained two boxes of gas masks and filters.

On a desk was a cassette box labelled "Jihad", with the name of Osama bin Laden hand-written along the spine. Most chilling of all, however, were the mass of calculations and drawings in felt pen that filled up a white board of the sort used in classrooms. There were several designs for a long thin balloon, something like a weather balloon, with lines and arrows indicating a suggested height of 10km (33,000 feet). There was also a sketch of a jet fighter flying towards the balloon alongside the words: "Your days are limited! Bang." This, like the documents, was written in English.

Since UTN was run by one of Pakistan's top scientists, a man with close links to the Taliban and, it is said, close ideological affinities with Mr bin Laden, the circumstantial evidence points to only one conclusion. Whoever fled this house when the Taliban fell was working on a plan to build a helium-powered balloon bomb carrying anthrax. Whether it was detonated with a timer or shot down by a fighter, the result would have been the same: the showering of deadly airborne anthrax spores over an area as wide as half of New York city or Washington, DC.

After the September 11th attacks, it was generally agreed that western intelligence agencies had failed through lack of "human intelligence"--men on the ground, as opposed to spy satellites and computers monitoring phone calls and e-mails. This failure was to be rectified. Yet since the fall of Kabul on November 13th, journalists have been fanning out across the city. They have stripped houses such as this one, and others directly connected to the al-Qaeda network, of all sorts of documents and other valuable evidence. These have included the names and addresses of al-Qaeda contacts in the West. For the West's intelligence agencies, September 11th was Black Tuesday. There may be no words with which to describe their failure in the week since the fall of Kabul.