The DC police, to be sure, did not take chances. As the US launched airstrikes under cover of darkness against military targets throughout Afghanistan just after noon last Sunday, they closed some downtown streets and beefed up their presence at the Capitol, at airports and at Metro stations. And in the air, fighter jets continued the patrol over the skies that began Sept. 11 when terrorists killed thousands in the attacks at the Pentagon and in New York and Pennsylvania. But for all intents and purposes, Washingtonians went about their day flying kites, watching football games, lining up at movie theaters and picking pumpkins.
That’s not to say that Washingtonians and other Americans throughout the country were ambivalent (no one is these days) about what was taking place - and what potentially will take place as these events unfold. For in the words of President Bush, this is meant as a "sustained, comprehensive and relentless’’ campaign. Clearly, its repercussions will reverberate beyond Afghanistan itself.
At first blush, this war — for war it is —- appears clear-cut, not much unlike the one waged in, say, Yugoslavia and Iraq, with much international support lined up behind the US, including, in this case, NATO, the United Nations and many governments around the world, along with reportedly more than 40 that have granted air transit or landing rights to US aircraft.
But it is not clear-cut, for the offensive in Afghanistan promises to be longer and costlier, as well as more complicated and difficult, than any conflict in recent years.
Prudently, the US has ruled out a ground war against a country that for centuries has been the graveyard of invading superpowers, opting instead to engage essentially in an air-power driven offensive directed against terrorist training camps, and against anti-aircraft sites, military headquarters, airfields and concentrations of tanks.
The question here, as this "sustained, comprehensive and relentless" campaign drags on, is: is there a danger that the US will be tempted, perhaps if the conflict gets out of hand, to conduct widespread strikes against the military and strategic assets of other countries "harboring terrorist organizations"?
After all, it is not clear that the US has come up with a convincing and officially agreed-upon definition of who exactly is a "terrorist" and who is not. The French, for example, called members of the Algerian national movement terrorists, as did Americans call the Vietcong, and as do today the Israelis call Hamas.
You could call these people terrorists till you are blue in the face, and till your eyeballs pop out, but to the indigenous societies that spawned their emergence, they are freedom fighters. This is not by any means a trivial pursuit of semantics. Two weeks ago, Reuters’s head of global news, Stephen Jenkins, directed his staff to avoid the word "terrorist" in their news reports for exactly that same reason.
That’s not to say that those who fly airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center are, by any stretch of the imagination, freedom fighters; but Juke’s point obviously is well taken. The media, especially the American media, have become too glib in dismissing anyone in guerrilla garb, fighting for freedom as a terrorist, and glossing over anyone in army uniform, resorting to acts of terror, as a soldier. (What come to mind here are Hezbollah fighters and Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.)
The question has, to be sure, already been raised as part of the internal debate inside the Bush administration: Will the follow-up to the campaign in Afghanistan be a contained air-ground assault on Iraq?
An unlikely scenario? Think again. Robert D. Novak, the nationally syndicated and highly respected columnist, wrote last Sunday in the Washington Post: "According to Pentagon sources, nothing like the build-up preceding Desert Storm would be needed to deal with Saddam Hussein’s depleted forces .... George W. Bush clearly has opted against such a war. But from testimony of people close to him ... the Iraqi option remains open."
The fact of the matter is that long before the airstrikes on Afghanistan were mounted last Sunday - strikes that anyhow had been anticipated by everyone — American policy-makers were looking around for a long-term strategy to integrate the fight against terrorism into a new security framework that addressed the full range of dangers that Washington perceives itself to be facing today. One of these, as Washington sees it, is the danger of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, biological and chemical.
In pursuit of that policy, there is always the chance that Washington may lose its cool, and precipitate Desert Storm II.
No doubt the United States is aware that beyond the military outcome, lie geopolitical pitfalls as well. Who will, for example fill the vacuum when the Taleban power base starts to crumble? What political forces will unravel in neighboring Pakistan as the conflict drags on?
In his short speech to the nation last Sunday, Bush railed against "the barbaric criminals who profane a great religion by committing murder in its name."
That could very well be true. But what he did not say was that these are dangerous times indeed.
