NOV. 17 - DEC. 7, 2001

Last update 17 Dec. 2001

WAR NEWS JUNKIES: If 24/7 cable coverage isn't providing the details you crave on the war in Afghanistan, check out the Center for Defense Information's action updates: http://www.cdi.org/terrorism/actionupdate.cfm.

Here:
Gen. Wesley Clark: End approaching at Konduz
War casualties could test public's resolve
A new ground zero
Wolf Blitzer: The CIA in Afghanistan
General Wesley Clark: Tribal politics come into play
Gideon Rose: Why did September 11 happen?
General Wesley Clark: Taliban 'rats' bolt

CNN:

WASHINGTON - The war in Afghanistan has produced no American combat deaths, with U.S. warplanes quickly taking command of the skies and soaring high above the battlefield to soften up Taliban and terrorist strongholds for a proxy army on the ground.

Now, hundreds of U.S. special forces troops are in Afghanistan, engaging the enemy at close range and searching for Taliban leaders and terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, increasing the possibility of U.S. casualties and of a test of the public's willingness to accept them.

The nation has been warned. President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have repeatedly said that American troops might be lost in the tough and lengthy global war on terrorism they have warned about.

Addressing the nation when the bombs began to fall Oct. 7, Bush said the troops might have to make the ultimate sacrifice of their lives.

Despite such warnings, there is some evidence that U.S. officials have questioned whether Americans would accept significant casualties, in spite of polls indicating that they would.

An adviser to senior Pentagon officials said concerns about high U.S. casualties led the Bush administration to craft a strategy that relied on air power and small numbers of commandos, as opposed to tens of thousands of American ground troops.

"They are risk-averse about casualties," said the adviser, who requested anonymity. "They didn't know what we were facing. Did [al-Qaida] have chemical weapons?"

Initially, the ground fighting was left to America's proxy force, the Northern Alliance rebels who swept through Mazar-e Sharif and the capital, Kabul, with the aid of U.S. bombing. Now, the anti-Taliban Pashtun tribes in the south also have the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists on the run.

Relying on a proxy army can have its drawbacks, especially in a place such as Afghanistan, where ethnic and tribal rivalries run deep and the United States might not be able to control its surrogates.

Because the Northern Alliance, rather than U.S. forces, holds Kabul, the seeds of another Afghan civil war might have been planted.

More direct involvement

In the weeks before the alliance entered Kabul, American commandos were advising the anti-Taliban leaders and providing them with arms and other supplies. Now, with the northern part of the country in rebel hands and the top Taliban and terrorist leaders in the south, U.S. special operations troops are more directly involved in ground action in the south, blocking roads, calling in airstrikes and engaging in gunbattles.

"They are armed, and they're participating," Rumsfeld said Friday. "They have gone into places and met resistance and dealt with it."

This month, a special operations team was nearly overrun by Taliban troops in northern Afghanistan and had to call in protective airstrikes.

Few U.S. losses have been reported during Operation Enduring Freedom. Last month, two American soldiers were killed when their helicopter crashed in Pakistan and another was killed in a truck accident in Turkey. A sailor was lost this month in a fall from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk.

Relatively small numbers of U.S. ground troops were introduced into Afghanistan three weeks after lawmakers, including Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and a number of retired military officers - concerned about the slow pace of the action - began calling for the use of thousands of ground troops.

At the same time, Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired Army officer and professor of international relations at Boston University, was chiding the Army for not becoming more involved on the ground.

"The fault lies with a high command that has lost all sense of what it means to go for the jugular," he wrote in the Boston Globe this month, arguing that the public is supportive of military action. "It can no longer be attributed to casualty aversion on the part of the U.S. public."

"Fault" seems an odd choice of words in light of the events of recent days, during which a classic softening-up operation resulted in a collapse of the Taliban in much of the country. Still, a degree of wariness about combat casualties seems to have been at play.

'Casualty aversion'

Some officers say the heavy casualties of the Vietnam War led to an overly cautious approach in combat and peacekeeping operations that became known as "casualty aversion."

Predictions were made that the Persian Gulf war would produce more than 20,000 casualties.

Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun

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Several days earlier, a New York Times photo spread - both riveting and repulsive - showed Northern Alliance troops brutally killing a captured Taliban fighter who had been pleading for his life. Times columnist Maureen Dowd cited those photos when she wrote: ''We give the Northern Alliance an air force and they embarrass us with brute force.''

Not long ago, the nation's journalists and news consumers were forced to rely on Defense Department briefings and hazy flashes of light in the night sky to try to discern what was happening in Afghanistan. The Pentagon had solid control over the flow of information; frustrated journalists were writing angry op-ed columns; and the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Radio-Television News Directors Association were beseeching Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to offer more access to the war zone.

But last week the situation on the ground changed dramatically, and reporters began roaming Afghanistan in droves: Cable networks CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC/NBC say they now have a total of roughly 70 people working inside Afghanistan. Once witnesses from afar, reporters are delivering stunningly up-close-and-personal views of the war, chronicling everything from joyous post-Taliban haircuts to individual acts of bloody retribution.

''We are seeing dead bodies,'' said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. ''We didn't see them during the Gulf War.'' Or at least not until its end.

''It's a Vietnam situation,'' added Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center, recalling the last conflict in which journalists traversed a war zone involving Americans in relative freedom. ''The story will be told much more graphically.''

This unexpected dynamic - the fog of war dissipating to reveal events on the ground with clarity - creates challenges and opportunities for the US government trying to prosecute the battle and the journalists trying to report it. Moreover, it holds the potential to sway American public opinion, a critical factor that often dictates the balance of power between the media and the military. (Surveys reveal that when the battle seems to be going reasonably well, citizens prefer to let the Pentagon determine what news is fit to print. By a ratio of 2-1, respondents to an October Pew Research Center poll wanted the military, rather than journalists, to make coverage decisions about this war.)

A number of observers acknowledge that a conflict covered at much closer range poses possible public relations pitfalls for the Pentagon. At the same time, the early consensus is that it is the journalists who have been struggling to find their footing in the rocky terrain of a more open Afghanistan. Ironically, the complaint is that now that they can view the scene up close, they are losing broader perspective on the war - or to use the old cliche - missing the forest for the trees.

It was only a few weeks ago that Retired Marine General Bernard Trainor marveled at the administration's ''absolute control over the levers of news.'' That's ancient history. And Trainor now cautions that ''the minute you don't control the press, by definition, it means you have a potential management problem.''

''The one thing they're least prepared for is journalists running amok throughout the country,'' said Rosenstiel. ''From a military point of view, it presents a lot of complications.''

One potentially significant one is the impact on support for the war if Americans are bombarded with images and stories of our Afghan allies of convenience committing war crimes. That concern was manifest during a testy exchange Tuesday when a reporter at a Pentagon briefing asked about possible Northern Alliance atrocities in Mazar-e-Sharif and concerns about a ''potential bloodbath.''

The question struck a nerve. And Rumsfeld responded by demanding to know ''who's making these reports?'' before expressing his distaste at ''the implication ... that America is what's wrong with the world. ... The Taliban have been vicious repressors in that country.''

Mindful of the battle for hearts and minds, Trainor acknowledged that a searing image - such as the famous photo of the terrified girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam - ''does have a terrific impact.'' But he added ''I think it would take a lot to sour the American public right now.''

Thus far, support for the war effort seems to be at historic highs. A Gallup poll taken right before the fall of Kabul revealed that only 9 percent of Americans thought it was a mistake to send military forces to Afghanistan, a level of dissent and doubt considerably smaller than that voiced during the initial stages of the Gulf War (17 percent), Korea (20 percent), and Vietnam (24 percent).

''The honest truth is, strategically, it's a huge advantage,'' he said. ''In this case, there was strong public support in principle, but people doubted the strategy.'' Given the sights and sounds coming from places like Kabul this past week, he said, ''Do you think any other country, no matter how jealous they may be of American success, is going to aid the Taliban now?''

Jones believes that even scenes of victorious anti-Taliban forces behaving lawlessly would have ''zero chance'' of turning American citizens against the war. ''These are problems we wanted to have. I don't think it's going to turn people off.''

Though almost all welcome the idea of more thorough, firsthand reporting in Afghanistan, the early days of coverage have spawned some concern. David Anable, former managing editor of The Christian Science Monitor who now heads the International Center for Journalists, called much of last week's coverage ''overskeptical to the point of cynical. There's been a real tendency on the part of the media to assume the worst... to assume the Northern Alliance is a bunch of wild-eyed murderous twits.''

''Everybody is very anxious to hear the stories ... and there are a lot of stories to tell,'' added Trainor. But ''I get a little annoyed over the hearts and flowers on the brutality on the part of the Northern Alliance. A little balance is in order.''

''One of the things that surprised me so far is how negative the reporting has been,'' Jones said. ''Reporters tend to believe that what they see is the story, and that can lead to myopia. ... If the issue becomes the Northern Alliance behaving like ladies and gentlemen, that's beside the point.''

Yet, at least publicly - and Rumsfeld's brief fit of pique notwithstanding - the Pentagon contends that it's plenty satisfied with the story that reporters have been carrying from the battlefield to our living rooms for the past week.

''The more access there is, including the eyes and ears of the media, the better off we are,'' said Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke. ''The Afghan people have been showing how pleased they are that the Al Qaeda and Taliban were headed out of town.''

Asked about the effect of such disturbing images as the the gruesome photographs in the Times, Clarke said that the nation's citizens ''are demonstrating, again and again, an incredibly solid understanding of what we're dealing with.''

With recent events inside Afghanistan, the Pentagon may have lost considerable control over the information spigot, creating a far more fluid and dicey situation. But at least so far, it hasn't lost control over the spin or of public opinion.

This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 11/18/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

CNN:

(CNN) -- Anchor Wolf Blitzer recently visited London where he spoke with people about their views and concerns over the war on terror in Afghanistan and role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in it. The CIA confirmed Wednesday that one its officers was the first American to die in combat in the war.

By the way, many of the CIA officers are recruited from the military so their relationship with the troops often comes naturally. They tend to understand the military mission.

CNN:

CNN:

November 26, 2001

Gideon Rose is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. His recently-released book, "How Did This Happen: Terrorism and the New War" is a collection of essays from experts in the areas of international issues, terrorism, military strategy and security, including former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark. He joined the CNN.com chat room from New York.

CNN: Your book brings together 24 of the world's foremost authorities on the Mideast, terrorism and diplomacy. Were these experts able to define in simple terms what is behind the anti-American sentiment that led to the attacks on September 11?

ROSE: The best piece in the book on that particular subject is a chapter by a scholar at Princeton, named Michael Doran, that describes the attack as somebody else's civil war. He argues that Osama bin Laden and his network of terrorists are best understood as the extremists within the extremist camp of radical Islam, and that their chief goal is to promote a pure, universal Islamic community. Their chief enemy, [it is argued,] is the Arab Muslim leadership that they consider corrupt and repressive, and no longer following the true faith.

The argument he makes is that the United States essentially has been brought into this conflict because it is seen as the chief backer of these Arab regimes, and because in the last several years, the radical Islamists have been stymied in their attempts to topple the Arab regimes, such as those in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, directly. So now, in a sense, the targeting of the United States is a measure of desperation, and an attempt to direct change within the Arab-Muslim world itself.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: What part, if any, did the Middle East conflict play in the growth of terrorism?

ROSE: A number of authors in the book touch on this, and essentially agree that the Arab-Israeli conflict plays a role in generating dissatisfaction within the Arab and Muslim worlds, but did not cause the attacks in the first place. Basically, these attacks were planned long before the peace process foundered, and the people behind the attacks have no desire for a secure, stable peace settlement. They would like to see the elimination of Israel entirely, so in some sense, a move toward a settlement in the way that most understand that would not be a good outcome for the Islamist radicals.

So, the failure of the peace process, and the increasing violence between Arabs and Israelis did not cause the attacks, but does contribute to dissatisfaction and anger within the Arab and Muslim world more generally, that provides a climate in which extremism and anti-Americanism can find some support. So, working hard to get the Arab-Israeli conflict under control, the authors agree, can and should be part of the overall response to the attacks.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Would this not have happened because of the hatred toward the United States even if peace had developed between Israel and Palestine?

ROSE: Absolutely. These attacks were set in motion long before, when the peace process was going well, not badly. There's no reason to believe that they would have not occurred had the peace process worked out.

CNN: How could the attacks have been avoided, according to these experts?

ROSE: The people in the book essentially focus on three separate topics. The first concerns the motivations of the people who carried out the attacks, and the context in which they operate. The second broad subject relates to American vulnerabilities. The third broad subject relates to the overarching historical significance of the attacks, and the new world we are in.

With regard to American vulnerability, several of the authors point out that the problem lies in an American economy and society that put a premium on openness and the free flow of goods and people, and that this created a situation in which security and homeland defense were low priorities. A number of the essays suggest ways in which the flows of goods and people, whether through the economy or through the air traffic control system or through the borders, can be better policed and regulated, so as to reduce the vulnerabilities. They all stress, however, that there's no way to guarantee that future attackers can never succeed.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Do you think that the influx of non-American people into this country contributed to September 11

ROSE: It's not so much the influx of non-Americans as the failure to track and protect ourselves from those with hostile intent. So, pure immigration reform probably isn't the answer, but better tracking and managing of information about who is coming in and where they are and what they're doing might well be in order.

CNN: From a terrorism perspective, are all the acts of aviation terrorism believed to be linked?

ROSE: The authors argue that the September 11 attacks were carried out by the same organization or network that carried out the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, the bombing of the Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia, and other radical Islamist terrorist attacks. But they are not directly linked to previous airline hijackings, let's say before the early 1990's. In fact, one of the most dangerous and scary features of what happened on September 11 was the change in tactics that the terrorists used. Previously, almost nobody had thought of turning a plane into a guided missile, and so the authors in the book generally agree that these recent attacks mark a new and dangerous stage in terrorism more generally. No longer are terrorists merely interested, as we used to think, in "having lots of people watching, not lots of people dead."

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Some critics want to blame September 11 on the Clinton administration for not seeking out al Qaeda and getting bin Laden. What is the authors perspective on this?

ROSE: The authors note in the book many attempts made to thwart previous terrorism, and to crack down on Osama bin Laden and his network, for example, by tracking and blocking his financial resources. Nevertheless, it's clear that not enough was done, but as the chapter on intelligence reform suggests, establishing benchmarks for what performance by government agencies involved in counter-terrorism should be, is very, very difficult. In baseball, we know that a batter who gets one hit in three times at bat is excellent, and one who gets one in four times at bat is okay, and one who gets one hit in five times at bat is lousy. But we only know that because we have a vast track record of human experience in baseball to judge each new case against. In counter-terrorism, it's very hard to say just what a good job is, even though we'd all like it to be 100% success.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Why aren't the other Muslim countries more outspoken on the terrorist problems?

ROSE: That's a good question. The authors in the book argue that the attacks and the climate in which the attackers could thrive are part of a larger trend in the Arab-Muslim world that consists of an inability to thrive in the modern world, and the dissatisfaction and frustration felt by many ordinary Arabs and Muslims around the world at the relative failure of their country's political and economic performance in recent decades, has created a large pool of resentment that sometimes can find itself directed against the United States as the chief backer of the current system. Many Arab and Muslim governments, the authors argue, are failing their own peoples, and are reluctant to challenge them or upset them further by confronting openly their false views on, for example, the pernicious role of the United States and Israel in causing the failure of Arab and Muslim fortunes. Silence is sometimes the more cautious course for these regimes.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Mr. Rose, were there signs of the attack that U.S. intelligence agencies missed?

ROSE: There were indications, not only that the attackers were prepared to come at the United States, but also that they were prepared to use planes as weapons. A terrorist was caught on his way to an attack at the Los Angeles international airport just before the millennium celebrations, and the man behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Ramzi Yousef, had planned to blow up several planes in the Pacific a couple of years later. Moreover, the United States had picked up reason to believe that Osama bin Laden and his network felt themselves to be in a life or death struggle against the United States. All this made U.S. intelligence nervous, and made them concentrate on trying to stop bin Laden and his agents, but unfortunately, there were no specific details about the attack available beforehand that were caught in time to prevent it.

CNN: From an intelligence perspective, can the CIA ever rehabilitate itself in order to prevent such attacks again?

ROSE: One of the best chapters in the book is on precisely this subject. It's also one of the most depressing. Because it argues that intelligence reform is unlikely to achieve much in the short or even medium term. In the long term, the author notes, a revitalization of human intelligence could bear fruit, but the real problem lies not just in the CIA but in the society at large, which has paid far too little attention to the outside world and the serious study of it in recent decades.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Why didn't the U.S. government listen to Oliver North when he told the Senate who Osama bin Laden was and what he was capable of?

ROSE: It's an urban legend that Oliver North noted Osama bin Laden by name in his Iran-Contra testimony. So, there was nothing to listen to. In general, we knew that terrorism was a problem, but almost nobody thought it would be this great a problem.

CNN: Do you have any closing comments to share with us?

ROSE: One of the things that's most interesting about the book is that it presents the current crisis from several different angles, such as the diplomatic context, the historical context, the ideological context, and the social context. At the end of the day, however, what one comes away with is, I think, just how difficult it is to prepare for and manage high-consequence, low-probability events, such as we've just witnessed. We need to be prepared without losing our heads, and that's going to be a very difficult thing to manage.

CNN: Thank you for joining us today.

ROSE: So long, and we welcome your comments at the magazine.

Gideon Rose joined the CNN.com chat room from New York and CNN provided a typist. This is an edited transcript of the interview which took place on Monday, November 26, 2001.

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