By Sir Timothy Garden
In the wake of the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush has declared war on terrorism and invited the rest of the world to join America in this new mission. NATO has taken the unprecedented step of bringing Article V of its founding treaty into play. This article, designed to provide collective security against an attack by the Soviet Union, treats an external attack on the territory of one member as an attack on all members. Similar arrangements under the ANZUS treaty have come into operation for Australia and New Zealand. As a show of political resolution and solidarity these measures are entirely welcome. However translating them into a coherent plan of action will be more complex.
Technically war can only be declared by one state on another state. Since, at the time of writing, the USA is still investigating who might have been responsible, it is difficult to declare war in the formal sense. If it turns out to be Osama bin Laden and his dispersed groups, the problem remains. Indeed if you give him and his henchmen the status of combatants, they immediately become eligible for the international legal rights accorded to soldiers. This would mean that they could use lethal force against other soldiers, and if captured they would have to be treated as prisoners of war. The British have taken great care to ensure that the IRA were never able to achieve this status. Declarations of war need to be treated with caution. Even in the looser sense of an all out effort, there are problems. The USA has previously declared war on drugs. This is a battle in which there may be successes, but no victory. By declaring war on terrorism the military aims become very diffuse and there will be significant differences of view in any international coalition.
If all members of the coalition are allowed to define terrorism in their own terms, we may find the West being expected to support the Russians against the Chechens, the Turks against the Kurds, the Israelis against the Palestinians, and the Indonesians against a number of their dissident groups. Would such a war against terrorism have extinguished the ANC in its dark days and left South Africa to apartheid? The West supports dissident groups in Iraq, and the US continues to provide financial support to the IRA (in a quirk of timing the renewed IRA support was reported in the Financial Times on the same day as its first reports of the World Trade Centre attacks). As many are now saying, the cure for all the forms of terrorism around the world needs to address the many different causes and circumstances which breed terrorists. A blanket war on terrorism will fail as surely as a war on drugs.
What must be done in the immediate future is to focus on the response to the act of terrorism of last week. It has been characterised as an attack on America. This is only partially true. Many nations are represented in the lists of those killed. Several hundred UK citizens are missing. Imagine what our reaction would have been if that number had been killed in a bomb outrage in England. Germany appears to have lost even more of its nationals. Even China has lost citizens in this multinational disaster. There is therefore a much stronger reason for a multinational response than just support of the US. Both the victims and the perpetrators are international.
What are the immediate actions needed to respond? The threat from this group of terrorists must be eliminated. It may be that in the longer term a wider consensus on the elimination of terrorism will be possible - but that will take time. First things first, and keep it simple as far as possible. The elimination of the current threat will need to be addressed in two ways: one defensive and one offensive. Defensive measures are the heightened security on the ground and in the air which is now being implemented. Greater public awareness of the danger is also a help. Co-ordinating intelligence both within countries and between countries will be vital. There will be many sleepers who have yet to carry out their suicidal acts of terrorism. The best way of making life difficult will be to harry the terrorists who are already in place waiting for the moment to launch an atrocity. There are some military defensive measures which would be sensible. Short range air defences around nuclear power stations and nuclear weapon storage sites would not go amiss.
The offensive measures are more difficult to specify while the targets remain uncertain. If bin Laden is responsible and is still in Afghanistan, there is at least an address for the operation. Air attack by bombers and cruise missiles would be relatively easy, but are likely to fairly ineffective. He has probably dispersed his men already. An attack on Kabul to force the Taliban government to deliver bin Laden would almost certainly fail in its aim. It is a weak government that could not deliver him even if it wanted to. That leaves a special forces operation, with supporting air power, as the most likely operation to produce a visible success. This is full of risks, but offers the greatest chance of a retaliation which the public would appreciate.
While the offensive military options will excite the most public and political interest, we must keep reminding our leaders that the less exciting defensive measures are the more important. Once we have the current crisis under control, we need to start addressing the global problems which have been getting worse over the last decade. We missed a great opportunity at the end of the Cold War and it has come back to bite us. However, this phase may need to wait until the current problem is successfully brought back under control.