Opinion Editorials
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There Is No Substitute for Victory
October 26, 2001
War is a miserable business. The lives of a nation's finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted, economies are damaged. Strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that will be lost when war claims its wages from us. Shed a tear, and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must.Complete Destruction
There is no avoiding the war we are in today, any more than we could have avoided world war after our fleet was bombed at Pearl Harbor. America is under attack by a depraved, malevolent force that opposes our every interest and hates every value we hold dear. We must expect and prepare for our enemies to strike us again. As in all wars we must endure before we prevail. Only the complete destruction of international terrorism and the regimes that sponsor it will spare America from further attack.
As the president has explained, this war will have many components. But American military power is the most important part. When it is brought to bear in great and terrible measure it is a thing to strike terror in the heart of anyone who opposes it. No mountain is big enough, no cave deep enough to hide from the full fury of American power. Yet our enemies harbor doubts that America will use force with a firm determination to achieve our ends, that we will use all force necessary to achieve unconditional victory. We need to persuade them otherwise, immediately.
Fighting this war in half measures will only give our enemies time and opportunity to strike us again. We must change permanently the mindset of terrorists and those parts of Islamic populations who believe the terrorist conceit that they will prevail because America has not the stomach to wage a relentless, long-term, and, at times, ruthless war to destroy them. We cannot fight this war from the air alone. We cannot fight it without casualties. And we cannot fight it without risking unintended damage to humanitarian and political interests.
The United States is not waging war against a religion or a race. For too long our enemies have been allowed, even by America's purported friends in the region, to sow their hatred of us throughout the Islamic world. Should the conduct of our war incidentally help inflame that hatred it may indeed increase the threat to regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere whose stability is a strategic interest of the United States. But that threat will be infinitely greater should we fail in our mission or delay victory by one day longer than necessary.
We must reject appeals to suspend military operations to accommodate the religious practices of affected populations. Fighting during Ramadan is no more a war against Islam than fighting during Hanukkah and Christmas is a war against Judaism and Christianity. Nor should we agree to a cease-fire to feed starving Afghans. It wouldn't work anyway. The Taliban have no interest in feeding their people. Their only aim is to prevent our victory, and only our victory will alleviate the suffering of innocent Afghans.
It is clear that to destroy bin Laden and his associates we will first need to destroy the regime that protects them. To achieve that end, we cannot allow the Taliban safe refuge among the civilian population. We must destroy them, wherever they hide. That will surely increase the terrible danger facing noncombatants, a regrettable but necessary fact of war. But it will also shorten the days they must suffer war's cruel reality.
Nor should we delay or shrink from helping those Afghans committed to the destruction of our enemies. The Northern Alliance wants to destroy the Taliban regime. So do we. That is reason enough to give them all the air support and other assistance they need to take Mazar-e-Sharif, Kabul and any other Taliban territory they can conquer just as quickly as possible.
We have been sparing in the amount of ordnance we have dropped on the Taliban front lines. We have not yet employed B-2s and B-52s, the most destructive weapons in our airborne arsenal, against them. We shouldn't fight this war in increments. The Taliban and their terrorist allies are indeed tough fighters. They'll need to experience a more impressive display of American firepower before they contemplate surrender.
Munitions dumps and air defenses are necessary targets. But so are the Taliban soldiers. Those soldiers and their commanders will not become dispirited, abandon the regime, and become intelligence assets in our war against terrorists until a great many of their comrades have been killed by the United States armed forces.
The president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has been our good and steadfast ally in a war that would, if unsuccessful, threaten his regime. Pakistan has a legitimate interest in who rules its chronically unstable eastern neighbor. But al Qaeda and time, not the violence of our campaign, nor the ups and downs of Afghan politics, are the greater threats to our friend's interests and to ours. Keeping our priorities straight will serve all our interests best.
We have a great many interests in the world that were, until September 11, of the first order of magnitude, and the central occupation of American statesmen. No longer. Now we have only one primary occupation, and that is to vanquish international terrorism. Not reduce it. Not change its operations. Not temporarily subdue it. But vanquish it. It is a difficult and demanding task that will affect many other important interests, favorably in the long run, but in short run, in some instances, unfavorably. That cannot be helped, and we should not make victory on the battlefield more difficult to achieve so that our diplomacy is easier to conduct.
Destroy Our Enemies
We did not cause this war. Our enemies did, and they are to blame for the deprivations and difficulties it occasions. They are to blame for the loss of innocent life. They are to blame for the geopolitical problems confronting our friends and us. We can help repair the damage of war. But to do so, we must destroy the people who started it.
Veterans of war live forever with the memory of war's merciless nature, of the awful things that had to be done by their hand. They did not recoil from their terrible duty because they knew that the freedom they defended was worth dying and killing for.
War is a miserable business. Let's get on with it.
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