First of all, the United States should resist at all cost the temptation of bombing random locations in any country. That would only bring more innocent people dying and suffering, more hate, and maybe even more terrorist attacks. It certainly wouldn’t bring LESS terrorist attacks, because those are not the random work of insane psychopaths, but desperate acts of people with an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness when faced with what they perceive as intolerable injustice and evil. Bombing their cities and killing their families doesn’t seem the best way to make them feel less desperate. The problem is that after a certain stage, trying to scare them away or “break their will” is pointless; when people have already lost most of what they value or care about, you can’t scare them with threats or even real violence and cruelty anymore. That would only strengthen their resolve. Those people feel like “la resistance” in World War II France, fighting a mighty enemy with whatever weapons they have.
Consider, for example, the four hijacked planes. How could four or five people armed only with razors or something similar intimidate forty or fifty people? That’s possible because the forty or fifty people had a lot to lose; above all, they didn’t want to die. But at the fourth plane, when they found out that they were going to die anyway, they decided to stop the terrorists even if at the price of klling themselves.
What I am trying to say is that people who have nothing to lose are an unconquerable enemy. So, unless the plan is to kill them all (which, last time I checked, was called genocide and is supposed to be bad, although universally tried anyway), the situation will NOT improve if any place is bombed back into the stone age. On the contrary, it’s necessary to give those people hope; they miss very basic things like a home which won’t be bombed, plundered or invaded periodically.
But short of leveling some places with nuclear bombs (the “kill them all” solution), what else is there to do? Supporting crazy rebels is absurd and helped to create this situation in the first place. Sending “special forces” to “help eradicate the terrorists” is almost certain to create another Vietnam, with similar results. Sending a full military assault to invade might seem tempting, but consider what happened to the USSR when they tried to invade Afghanistan… consider what’s happening to them in Chechnya… and those places are on their borders, not thousands of miles away!
So, for the “What now?” question, I am forced to conclude that any solution will NOT come from the irrational use of force, but from a sincere attempt to ease the suffering of those people. Even if it means IMPOSING a solution by force (as it happened in Japan after World War II), the solution must be sincerely crafted to bring peace and prosperity to the people involved. It’s pathetic how Israel does whatever it wants while the USA and the UN whine about it and are ignored but still supply enormous military support to them. It should not be a surprise that the palestinians get furious at the USA. Maybe the time has come for the USA (and the UN) to stop childishly begging Israel and the palestianians to “please behave” and “please negotiate” and simply FORCE a peace plan ON BOTH SIDES. Send lots of troops there and say STOP. Prevent, by force if necessary, Israel from bulldozing and invading palestinian territory. And do the same to protect Israel from palestinian attacks. This would require lots of courage and determination, but would have the merit of being be a mission to SAVE human lives instead of one to take them for revenge. And that would be an action which would address one of the main CAUSES of the problem, not it’s collateral manifestations. Today it may be Bin Laden, tomorrow it will be someone else. Just killing or capturing him or many others solves nothing.
[10 years later....]
I would generally consider myself a pacifist of sorts… but other than annihilating some area where we suspect the terrorists hide out or annihilating Mecca itself, I don’t know what other solutions there are. These are not rational people we’re dealing with. They are not interested in peace. They need to be dealt with in such a way that they understand. Not only that but attacks need to be made on entities funding these people. Cut their funding, cut their supplies, cut everything. Those who fund them are equally guilty.
This situation has been raging on for 10 years, now, with people pointing fingers at each other, starting wars all over the middle east, the former administration convincing the public that Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden are the same person and responsible for 9/11, the new administration sending more troops to “fight the war on terror” under the same premise as the old administration, etc. What do we have to show for it? Nothing but weakness on our part? Body scans at airports? security pat downs? The Patriot Act? How many “terrorists” have been caught this way? Last time I checked, a big fat grand total of “0″. Makes you wonder who really is winning this “war on terror”…
The question that no one has been able to answer is “What do they want?” What does Al Qaeda want? What is their objective? It seems to me that the general public doesn’t even bother to stop and ask why is this happening? What do they want? Why has this never been addressed publicly?
You cannot force peace on these people. These are irrational Islamic extremists. Peace is not what they want and I don’t see any other way of dealing with them if its not 1) destroying Mecca and 2) making examples out of them… This is a nihilist point of view but these are not rational people that you can deal with in a civilized manner. Even if “what they want” became publicized and we “give it to them”, it will not stop them. You have these people posing as innocent civilians with bombs strapped under their clothes. How are you to stop this? Unfortunately, I don’t see any other way than to deal with these extremists using what they are most familiar with.
How is it that a nation that put a man on the moon cannot find another man who is supposedly hiding out in a cave in Pakistan? Is it that they really have no interest in finding him? (Probably)…
The “kill them all” approach would already be morally debatable even if we knew exactly where and who “they” are. But the thing is – we don’t, and if we just start killing random people because we’re angry, well, that’s a very dark road to follow.
Ironically, the values of “freedom” and “civil rights” and “respect to human dignity” which are supposed to be the justification for this sort of reaction are much more endangered by all the self-inflicted paranoid totalitarian stuff that you mentioned than by any terrorist action. The “war on terror” is waged mostly through terror, and mostly through terror on innocent people, with the “justification” that “we don’t know who the bad guys are”. Well, if it goes on like this, we are not going to need any bad guys. We will be doing their job ourselves.
As for “what do they want”, apart from delirious fundamentalist extremists frequently rejected by their own societies and who often wouldn’t even have any political importance if the US had not artificially funded and encouraged them when this seemed to be politically useful, most people just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace without being shot or exploded. Trying to shoot or explode them or their families seems to upset this balance a bit though, and not in the direction of increased serenity.
And as far as “why can’t we find him” goes, it could be even worse than “it would not be strategically useful to actually find him”. It’s probably the case that even what it’s supposedly being looked for is largely a fabrication, a myth – like the weapons of mass destruction that were not even there or didn’t mean what we thought to start with.
Best,
Sergio