WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden’s trail has grown cold in the remote Afghan fastness where he planned the horror-filled morning of Sept. 11. Smoking Osama out has given way to the unsatisfying but probably unavoidable strategy of waiting him out.
"Dead or alive" no longer signifies President Bush’s wish for justice at any price. Those three words now summarize the American leadership’s uncertainty about the fate of the Saudi-born mass murderer. Bin Laden is assuredly one or the other, Pentagon briefers say defensively. But they admit in frustration that they don’t know which.
Living in uncertainty about bin Laden — perhaps indefinitely — is a burden that Americans can and will shoulder with clarity and patience. Apprehending and punishing this fanatic is vital to restoring order to the American universe, however long it takes.
But the transition in the hunt for bin Laden from a black-and-white, dead-or-alive! approach to a more ambiguous, dead-or-alive? pursuit requires a steady hand and a steady tone of leadership. In moments like these, Americans want to be reassured that extending the war agenda will not be used to mask objectives that are partisan, personal or bureaucratic.
Wars produce that temptation. Odds and history both suggest that somewhere in the Bush administration lurks the next J. Edgar Hoover or Oliver North waiting to ride the pendulum of emergency powers to extreme lengths. President Bush’s early demands that the civil liberties of Arab-Americans and all other citizens be respected in the wake of Sept. 11 suggested a healthy awareness of that particular danger from government.
But such warnings have become rare as the immediate shock of the terror attacks and the drama of the unexpectedly swift military successes in Afghanistan have been absorbed into Washington’s unending struggles for budgetary resources and political advantage. The moral clarity about the balance of risks and rights in American society that the president voiced earlier has faded.
Phase II of the war on global terrorism got under way this month, but it is happening in American courts, media briefing rooms and congressional committee hearings — and in other places where the tensions created by a free society going to war surface and collide.
Those tensions are present in the debate over America’s treatment of prisoners, whether captured in Afghanistan and transported to Cuba or held in secret in Virginia and elsewhere on insubstantial immigration charges. Those tensions are also present in a growing concern that Attorney General John Ashcroft, who hogs every opportunity to go before the cameras to prosecute in public one lamentable-to-despicable American youth who joined the Taliban, is playing at politics, not justice.
And they are present in several recent sharp exchanges between the press and Pentagon briefers over the military’s increasingly opaque and unhelpful rendition of events in Afghanistan as U.S. soldiers and spies — perhaps not yet aware or perhaps unwilling to admit that they now operate in situations more gray than black or white — make mistakes or are forced into unforgiving choices about killing people whose identities have not been verified.
The Pentagon stubbornly refused at its midday briefing on Monday to own up to any likelihood that U.S. troops beat 27 blameless Afghan civilians, helped the CIA kill three scrap-metal scavengers with a remote-control Hellfire rocket intended for bin Laden, or threatened the life of a Washington Post reporter looking into that incident. Some journalists left the briefing muttering in amazement, others in anger.
But the transcript of that session is fascinating reading for other reasons as well. It contains an illuminating Socratic conversation between reporters and senior officials highlighting the fact that the CIA now operates deadly combat systems that are as destructive as many of the weapons controlled by the Defense Department. In Afghanistan, the spooks operate in the fog of war, but seemingly without the strict rules of engagement and accountability for lethal decisions demanded of the military. The Pentagon’s unease with this remains unstated — but clearly implied in that transcript.
I can’t think of another country that is a military power where this kind of concern would be raised in public discussion during ongoing military operations. In Britain, it would be against the law to discuss such things.
It is no surprise that mistakes happen in wartime and that bureaucracies try to avoid discussing them. But it is the supreme strength of the American system that the nation does not just shrug fatalistically at such mistakes and paper them over. The balance of rights and of risks is a constant and proper subject of debate in a society based on institutions that survive by imposing limits on those who would submerge them in excess.
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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