For the Common Defense

by Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski

  In Belgrade, the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic still insisted that it was the legitimate government of all Yugoslavia. Serbia still included Kosovo province, a hotbed of Muslim separatism encouraged by Albania. By 1999 the Kosovars had mounted a resistance movement that included rallies, protest marches, political organization, passive resistance, and small-scale guerrilla raids by the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) on the Yugoslavian (Serbian) security forces. The Serbian army and police responded with a vengeance and opened a new campaign of arrests, reprisals, depopulation, and killing. Kosovar refugees flooded the borders of Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia. In March 1999, the United States joined its NATO allies in a war designed to stop Serbian counterinsurgency operations in Kosovo and to save the Muslim civilian population from more ethnic cleansing. With political wishful thinking in flower in Washington and European capitals, the NATO strategy, to General Clark’s dismay, centered on bombing the Serbian ground forces in Kosovo, often embedded in the Kosovar cities and towns and thus shielded by the civilians whom NATO was attempting to save. Although the U.S. Army deployed air-defense units, artillery, and helicopters as well as infantry and special forces to the borders of Kosovo, the Clinton administration, including the JCS, shared NATO’s reluctance to confront the Serbian army. The aerial rules of engagement, designed to spare civilians as well as pilots, made it unlikely that the Serbs in Kosovo would feel enough pain to abandon the province. Muslim nations demanded action to save the Kosovars. The UN again turned to a reluctant NATO to handle Serbia, which ignored ceasefire initiatives. In October 1998, NATO had approved an air campaign against “Yugoslavia,” but NATO again stalled when Milosevic agreed to negotiate and ordered token reductions of his forces in Kosovo. The war continued, however, and Milosevic danced toward and away from a peace agreement until NATO (with U.S. concurrence) ordered a new air campaign to begin in March 1999. General Clark as SACEUR would execute the plan, but he did not think it would work and requested U.S. Army units for a ground war. Secretary Cohen and the JCS balked, the White House temporized, and the Senate approved only an air campaign by a vote of 58–41. Russia tried to block action in the UN.

  In an air campaign (March 24–June 10, 1999) against targets in Kosovo and Serbia proper, a NATO coalition air force tried to duplicate DELIBERATE FORCE, with limited success. The first phase against Serbian forces in Kosovo did little to stop the killing, as the Serbs and KLA grappled among 800,000 terrified Kosovars who had taken flight. The target set shifted to sites inside the rest of Serbia, including Belgrade. Milosevic talked, but still he did not say he would withdraw all of his troops from Kosovo and accept an international military and relief force in the province. He counted on NATO-U.S. disarray on the issue of a ground intervention, fed by bombing errors. NATO air strikes hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by accident, bombed a truck convoy of Kosovar refugees, and killed twenty civilians on a Serbian passenger train. Facing a hostile House of Representatives, which would endorse neither the air campaign nor the use of helicopters, Clinton rejected a British proposal for a ground offensive. NATO had put 25,000 ground forces in Albania and Macedonia, but the U.S. sent only a helicopter gunship battalion to Albania as a token force. The Europeans, however, with Britain and Germany leading, increased the pressure on Milosevic until the Serbs agreed to terms on June 9. NATO and Russian forces flooded into Kosovo as a 48,000-man Kosovo Force (KFOR) that included 8,500 American soldiers and airmen. The Europeans stopped the wars of Yugoslavian dissolution and sent Milosevic and his henchmen to the International Criminal Tribunal for trial for genocide and other crimes against humanity. Casualty-avoidance had postponed this strategic necessity by a decade at the cost of thousands of European lives, and the United States had been among the appeasers.

  Air-power enthusiasts found much comfort in the statistics of the Bosnian and Serbia-Kosovo air campaign combined. In seventy-eight flying days, U.S. military aircraft had flown about 38,000 sorties, or 60 percent of all NATO sorties. More than one-third of the sorties had targeted ground targets, which had been pounded with 31,000 pieces of ordnance, 8,000 of which were precision-guided. American aircraft had dropped 80 percent of the PGMs. In all, the American air forces lost two aircraft, compared to thirty-eight in the Gulf War. The technical means of finding targets on the ground grew at an astounding pace; satellites and the JSTARS aircraft could find ground targets with radar, photography, electronic tracking, and thermal searches and provide floods of data that could be processed only by high-speed computers and experienced targeteers. Techno-rapture affected all the services, and Washington believed that it could create strategic influence with precision-guided nonnuclear missiles fired from twenty thousand feet. Perhaps the New Age assumption of safe “push button” warfare had finally arrived.

  The Threat of Islamic Terrorists, 1993–2001

  The issue of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq by military force also confronted the Clinton administration and produced an even more limited response than the Balkan interventions. After Soviet forces left Afghanistan in 1989, the pro-Communist regime of Mohammed Najibullah did not survive a new civil war mounted against it by a coalition of anti-Soviet Afghan warlords and jihadis (holy warriors). Najibullah surrendered his government in 1992 to Burhanuddin Rabbani, who represented a loose warlord grouping known in the West as the Northern Alliance. A rival coalition challenged the new government. Its common feature was its roots in the majority Pashtun peoples who dominated the southern and more populated half of Afghanistan. The Pashtun coalition also enjoyed the support of Pakistan, which had given refuge to 3 million Afghan refugees and supplied the anti-Soviet guerrillas. Pakistani strategic preferences, shaped by its ubiquitous Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), saw the Pashtuns as allies against an encircling India and Iran. ISI backed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leading Pashtun-Sunni warlord, but shifted its support in 1992–1996 to a mystical, Islamic fundamentalist movement among the Pashtuns known as Taliban or “students of Islamic knowledge” in Arabic.

  Rallied by a fanatical mullah (religious authority) named Mohammed Omar and reinforced by young men indoctrinated in Pakistani madrassas (Islamic study centers) and trained in ISI paramilitary camps, the Taliban had fought the Soviets, Afghan Communists, and the Northern Alliance with increasing viciousness and success until it captured Kabul in 1996. The Taliban controlled all but the northernmost Afghan provinces and a small part of the Pakistan border. It imposed a ruthless theocratic regime based on the mullah’s interpretation of the social codes and religious practices they found in the Koran and sharia (holy law) drawn from it. In Western eyes the Taliban rejected centuries of hard-earned personal rights, women’s liberation, and humane laws. Its religious policies, however, attracted external financial support from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf States because the Taliban appeared to be an Arab and Sunni challenger to Shi’a Iran, the Great Enemy.

  The Taliban continued to enjoy the hospitable sanctuaries and arms aid permitted by Pakistan, ruled after 1999 by General Pervez Musharraf, who had to manage the ISI and maintain the U.S.-Pakistan alliance. The Taliban did indeed need outside help. Its mindless excesses encouraged resistance and international condemnation. Moreover, its rivals remained in control of the north and rallied on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” at least for now. Some 60 percent of Afghans were not Pashtun. They were Hazaras with Persian roots, Turkomens, Tajiks, and Uzbeks with ties to Iran and the former Soviet Islamic republics of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The Northern Alliance had its own heroes of the war against the Soviets. The best known was a Tajik, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Taliban’s Enemy Number One. Since 25 percent of Afghans were Tajiks and Massoud had proven a skilled, resourceful, and dogged leader of the Northern Alliance, he clearly became the center of the anti-Taliban resistance. His sincere patriotism and sympathy for Western humanitarianism also masked the Northern Alliance warlords’ lust for revenge, personal power, looting, and control of smuggling and th
e opium trade, for growing opium poppies was the heart of Afghan farming.

  Although the State Department and CIA area specialists warned about the Taliban’s potential for mischief, the Clinton administration could see no obvious way to subvert the Taliban except by backing the Northern Alliance, which it chose not to do. That the Taliban could be condemned for human rights violations through the UN was easy enough. The difficulty was that a war on the Taliban required political will General Musharraf did not have. The central concern of U.S.-Pakistani relations remained the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and preventing another war with India. These goals required a stable, cooperative Pakistani government, a position that deterred the United States from direct assault on the Taliban.

  Instead of worrying about the Taliban-Pakistani alliance, the administration focused on the consequences of the Gulf War and the central fact that a dangerous Saddam Hussein remained in power. Certainly the Iraqi dictator intended to stay in power until he transferred the family-clan tyranny to his sons, Qusay and Uday, murderous megalomaniacs like their father. The central instruments of control were the Baath Party, the security police, and a private army, the Republican Guard. Having lost a conventional war to the United States, Saddam Hussein formed two population-based regional paramilitary forces for local guerrilla-type resistance, the al Quds army and the Saddam Fedayeen (Saddam’s Faithful Warriors), which cowed any insurgency. Within these sacrificial armed mobs, the Republican Guard would defend Baghdad. The other part of Saddam Hussein’s desperate strategy would be the deterrent value and shocking use of chemical, nuclear, and biological materials mounted on missiles or spread by aircraft and other means. Although Iraq faced serious economic sanctions, including a ban on legal oil exports, Saddam intended to develop the impression that he had or would develop WMD capabilities prohibited by the terms of his 1991 surrender. He gambled that the U.S., the UN, and his regional foes would weaken in their resolve to enforce the arms ban and economic embargo, since they had not stopped him from crushing the Kurdish and Shi’a revolts of 1991.

  The anti-Saddam coalition, especially the United States, intended to enforce the WMD ban through two groups of technical inspection teams formed by the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). For nine years these teams struggled to identify, assess, and destroy the WMD and industrial facilities that could make nuclear, chemical, and biological warheads and the missiles and shells that carried them. Iraq cooperated only when threatened by force or when it became convinced that it would get some relief from its economic decline. The inspectors found that Iraq had WMD capabilities and had allowed their destruction, but Iraq had also made real and desperate efforts to obtain new WMD and to conceal others. In order to threaten Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the Iraqis tried to create the illusion of a vast WMD capability. Within this massive hoax Saddam Hussein never quit looking for ways to avoid the WMD ban and create a new WMD force. Exasperated by Saddam’s duplicity, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced that the U.S. would not accept an Iraqi pledge of disarmament unless Saddam surrendered power and a new regime allowed extended, comprehensive inspections inside Iraq. Congress approved of more pressure to remove Saddam Hussein in 1998. The prospect of regime change threw the UN Security Council into disarray. Saddam Hussein intended to leverage the WMD threat into safety from coercion. His fantasies killed him, his sons, and tens of thousands of others.

  Only after the Iraq invasion of 2003 did the true nature of Iraq’s WMD program become clearer. The IAEA inspectors, who specialized in nuclear materials, concluded that Iraq had probably destroyed or converted its ability to make nuclear warheads, but that it had the technicians and latent facilities to go nuclear again, although it would have taken five to ten years to do so. The threat was real but not immediate. The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), investigators of all WMD programs, found compelling physical evidence, verifying a defector’s report in 1995, that Iraq had retained a limited chemical and biological weapons capability, banned by the 1991 terms. In order to make an agreement to sell oil for medicine and food, the Iraqis became more cooperative about inspections of fixed sites, but they also mounted technical equipment on trucks so that these production assets could be moved away from prying eyes. Iraq was also evasive on the issue of surviving missiles and warheads. When the inspectors left Iraq in late 1998, they believed that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons or the capability to make them soon. The status of chemical and biological weapons remained more uncertain, and 2003 inspections by the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) found evidence of these types of WMD and missiles to carry WMD warheads.

  The United States regarded Iraq’s disregard for the WMD ban as serious business. It provided experts to the UNSCOM and IAEA teams. It maintained electronic monitoring systems that recorded events from underground to the ionosphere. It maintained its own intelligence sources within Iraq and exchanged information with British intelligence agencies. It built relations with the Kurds, the Shi’a Arab opposition, and Sunni expatriates like Ahmed Chalabi, who ran an exile movement. Sources within the regime provided Chalabi with information that suggested a robust WMD program. The program had an ardent director: Ali Hasan al-Majid al-Tikriti, or “Chemical Ali,” the mass murderer of Kurds and Iranians with poison gases. Saddam Hussein made Chemical Ali the master magician to mislead the IAEA and UNSCOM inspectors. Saddam enhanced his evil image by allowing his intelligence service to attempt to blow up George H.W. Bush during a victory tour to Kuwait in April 1993. Saddam Hussein calculated that he could provoke the United States into enough reaction that it would split the UN coalition and brand the U.S. as too pro-Israel to make it a firm ally of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates.

  The Clinton administration did indeed conclude that Saddam Hussein needed a lesson in cooperation, and it ordered up its favorite weapon, limited air strikes. After the Bush assassination attempt in June 1993, Clinton authorized the destruction of the headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence and police service; twenty-three Navy cruise missiles fired from warships in the Persian Gulf leveled the building at night to avoid civilian casualties. Under more permissive rules of engagement, a U.S. aircraft returned fire on several Iraqi antiaircraft missile batteries. In regional politics, however, the administration still worried about Iran as a military threat, pointed in that direction by its Arab allies. Plagued by many distractions at home and abroad, the administration fell back in line with the Saddam-containers. By 1998, however, terrorist attacks and Iraqi lack of interest in proving its WMD innocence convinced Clinton to execute another aerial punitive expedition on Baghdad. In December 1998, U.S. and British aircraft conducted Operation DESERT FOX, a four-day campaign that sent 650 sorties and 415 cruise missiles at Iraqi headquarters, the air-defense system, weapons storage sites, suspected WMD installations, and military barracks. Persuaded that Iraq would remain disarmed and Saddam chastised, the administration turned to the Kosovo crisis and another new threat, a terrorist bombing campaign against American targets.

  Behind the passing storms of civil wars in the Gulf, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia, came the rising thunder of international, nonstate terrorism. Unlike the European terrorists of the 1980s, murderous romantics left behind by the popular protests of the 1960s and 1970s, the new Arab terrorists had learned their business in the Palestinian uprising, the intifada, in Israel. Others, most notably the Abu Nidal group and Hezbollah, took the war on tourists and commuters on to aircraft and cruise ships. Other targets included officials, military advisers, and public figures. The rise of Arab terrorism represented the wisdom of the defeats in 1973 and 1982 at the hands of the Israeli armed forces and the American victory in the Gulf War. The most prominent American victims were members of the diplomatic service, armed forces, CIA, and other travelers abroad. Except for shocking TV coverage, this war did not engage the American public.

  The Clinton administration understood the menace of international terrorism be
cause the Reagan and Bush governments knew the numbers and had passed on the challenge. Between 1968 and October 1980, terrorists made more than 7,000 attacks, 2,700 of which involved Americans, 173 of whom died and 970 of whom were wounded. In 1981 Congress appropriated $40 million to turn diplomatic centers into fortresses. By 1984 the State Department had created a counterterrorism office led by veteran diplomats like Robert B. Oakley and L. Paul Bremer III. The State Department took the initiative in forming a high-level counterterrorism interdepartmental group to coordinate planning to protect Americans abroad and to watch for incoming terrorists. The first assumption was that terrorists could not function without government support. Incidents in the 1980s did reveal the fine hand of Libya, Syria, and Iran, which supported Hezbollah and other Muslim groups that focused on the destruction of Israel and the forced departure of its partner, the United States, from the Middle East. Pro-American regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia also faced a rise of Islamic radicalism. Among the more shadowy groups that joined the government’s watch-list was something called al-Qaeda, or “the base,” which appeared to be organizing in Egypt, Yemen, the Sudan, and Pakistan.