WASHINGTON — Did the United States err in bombing the Taliban from power and sending combat troops to chase Osama bin Laden into the Afghan wilds? The question will not even occur to most Americans. But the vision that the Afghanistan campaign will come to haunt the United States is alive and well abroad, and not just among anti-American zealots.
It comes as well from erudite Britons and other Europeans. The "ferocious" American bombing of Afghanistan "is more likely to intensify terrorism than abate it," Simon Jenkins predicted in a year-end column in The Times of London. He suggested that Americans had substituted "crude justice" for "wise justice" and expressed doubt that the campaign would "indeed enhance stability and a respect for justice in the region concerned and in the wider world."
These are serious concerns deserving a serious response. They point to problems that lie in wait for the Bush administration as it extends the hunt for bin Laden and his al Qaeda gang outside Afghanistan. They also underline the reality that Washington cannot take for granted the gains in American credibility the campaign has achieved thus far.
The administration’s first efforts to explain America’s response to Sept. 11 were necessarily mechanical and focused on Central Asia and the Middle East. Information centers were opened in different time zones and U.S. officials rushed onto Arab television to counter extremist propaganda.
But more important than the hearts-and-minds effort was the effective use of U.S. military power. If the bombing did not enhance global respect for justice — a tall order for a blunt instrument like military force, and not an objective ever embraced by the Bush administration — it temporarily enhanced global respect for America’s prowess and determination.
In a column devoted to misjudgments of 2001, Jenkins stoically acknowledged that he like many others abroad (and not only abroad) got the war wrong. "The Taliban were too weak to be strengthened" by reaction to U.S. bombing, as he predicted. His advice to Washington to rely on diplomacy and isolation of the Taliban and al Qaeda instead of force turned out to be, as the British might say, misplaced.
But he then goes on to voice what seem to be widespread expectations abroad that the United States will yet squander its gains. The bombing, he asserts, erased "the upsurge of sympathy" for America, which has now been replaced by "a traditional fear of its power."
Europeans are conditioned by their own failures in Central Asia to think that American efforts can fare no better. But they also understand that intervention — even as a last resort to remove a dangerous menace — earns no lasting gratitude for the intervening power. It is hard for Americans, who not only want but expect to be liked abroad, to accept something Europeans understand instinctively from their long history: Gratitude in these matters is highly ephemeral and more related to favors to come than actions just taken.
Americans also should understand that perceptions abroad of Operation Enduring Freedom are colored and distorted by the lingering echoes of past uses of U.S. power, from Vietnam to Grenada to Kosovo.
Military power was used more responsibly in the Afghan campaign than it has been in any modern war — because it could be. Advances in the precision of U.S. weapons enabled pilots and target planners to limit civilian casualties significantly when compared with the past. In this campaign, avoiding American losses was not the only thing that mattered.
No war is error-free or lacking in tragedy. But the Bush administration should now define more clearly to the world how Afghanistan differs from past U.S. actions abroad and what that means for the future. Attention and effort must now shift from the narrow hearts-and-minds approach to articulating the substance of the American reconnection to the world post-Sept. 11. Washington must show that its actions in Afghanistan signify more than vengeance.
That means enlisting more effectively America’s allies in a global campaign to contain terrorism and counter its underlying causes. The barely disguised U.S. military unilateralism of the Afghan campaign was necessary. But now Washington needs to make a conceptual adjustment, to recall how joint commands helped win World War II, and how the Nuremberg trials brought other nations into the prosecution and judging of war criminals.
Otherwise the war on terrorism will turn the United States into the lonely and beleaguered global policeman this nation must not become. "This time … I most fervently wish myself wrong," Jenkins wrote in projecting such an unhappy fate. Me, too, Simon. Americans should work hard to keep his string of misjudgments going.
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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