The war against terrorism



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INTRODUCTION


  1. On September 11, 2001, terrorists from the al-Qaeda network hijacked four American jetliners and used them as fuel-laden bombs against American civilian and government targets. Two aircrafts crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, killing more than 3,000 people from dozens of countries around the world, collapsing the towers themselves, and destroying much of the infrastructure of lower Manhattan. A third aircraft crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, killing more than 100 people and destroying a large section of that building, home to the US Department of Defence. A fourth aircraft, believed headed for the US Capitol, crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers apparently overpowered the hijackers.

  2. As millions in the United States, allied countries and elsewhere around the world watched the stark scenes unfolding before their eyes, it became clear that we all faced a threat to our homelands. At NATO headquarters, Secretary General George Robertson recognised that the events of September 11 constituted an act of war against the United States, and therefore against the entire Alliance. On September 12, the permanent representatives on the North Atlantic Council agreed with the Secretary General’s suggestion that Article 5 of the Washington Treaty be invoked if it were determined that the attacks were directed from abroad. The NATO nations had declared that the Alliance had been attacked, and each ally pledged to aid the United States by taking “such action as it deems necessary.”

  3. Within days, the list of suspects was narrowed to one terrorist organisation – the al-Qaeda network, based in Afghanistan, but with cells all over the world. By early October, the evidence was clear and compelling that al-Qaeda had orchestrated the attacks, and NATO accordingly confirmed that Article 5 was indeed applicable. On October 7, military action began in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that harboured the organisation and its leader, Osama bin Laden. More than 50 years after its founding in the depths of the Cold War, NATO was at war – not with the Soviet Union or any other state, but against a terrorist organisation and the regime that gave it shelter.

  4. September 11 was the bloodiest in a decade of al-Qaeda attacks on targets world-wide. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a branch of al-Qaeda is believed responsible for a 1992 bombing of a Yemeni hotel where American service members were staying. Bin Laden claimed he armed Somali forces who fought US troops in 1993, and the group is believed to be responsible for the 1993 bombing in an underground garage of the World Trade Centre, and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 301 people. Al-Qaeda also attacked the American navy ship USS Cole in Aden in 2000, killing 17 US sailors. The group reportedly planned attacks tied to the millennium celebrations in Los Angeles and Jordan that were foiled. The October 2002 attacks against the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen and at a night-club on the Indonesian island of Bali, which killed almost 200 people, are believed to be the work of al-Qaeda, showing that this truly is a global struggle.

  5. While the events of September 11 were shocking, they were not unforeseen. Many observers of the international scene in the 1990s had pointed out the risk that international terrorism – the deliberate targeting of civilians to achieve a political goal - posed to our nations and our societies, and top-level commissions repeated the warning. Most notably, the 1999 Hart‑Rudman Commission in the United States, led by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, bluntly stated: “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers,” and their report foreshadowed the horrific nature of the current conflict: “We should expect conflicts in which adversaries, because of cultural affinities different from our own, will resort to forms and levels of violence shocking to our sensibilities.”

  6. Likewise, NATO was well-aware of the threat that international terrorism posed to the homelands of its members. The 1999 Strategic Concept, approved by the newly enlarged 19‑member Alliance at the April 1999 Washington Summit, contains a clear statement that: “Alliance security interests can be affected by other risks of a wider nature, including acts of terrorism …” More broadly, that document points to threats in addition to terrorism, such as the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons, organised crime, and “disruption of the flow of vital resources,” and it calls for the allies to maintain forces capable of deterring “any potential aggression against it.”

  7. The US Congress had also been forthright and candid about the need for NATO to confront new threats. During the February 2000 meetings in Brussels, Rep. Douglas Bereuter told the Defence and Security Committee “that Europeans should support US-led operations which are distant from Europe that combat terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation and protect access to resources if the US is to continue to join crisis management operations, such as quelling ethnic conflict in Europe.”

  8. It is important to emphasize that the military campaign is only one part in the war against terrorism. We do not face a traditional enemy, nor a traditional struggle. Most notably, terrorists do not have a state that we can isolate and defeat. We have replaced the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but we have not yet defeated terrorism. We must target the financial network that nourishes terrorist groups, an effort where the European Union (EU) has made a significant contribution. We must work diplomatically to enlist other countries’ help in this struggle and to ensure that we can consolidate the victories we achieve militarily, as well as continuing our diplomatic efforts to isolate those countries that harbour terrorists or fund their activities. We must co-ordinate law enforcement efforts so that the terrorists operating in our own countries are brought to justice and prevented from carrying out future attacks, another area where the EU is playing a leading role. We must marshal all of our technological knowledge to protect our own technological infrastructure and to detect potential terrorist actions before they are carried out, and we must improve and co-ordinate our use of intelligence and covert operations to dissolve terrorist organisations.

  9. While your Rapporteur acknowledges the broad nature of this struggle, he will limit his report to examining the military campaign. He intends this report to be one part of a comprehensive package that the Assembly will produce on the war against terrorism. He looks forward to reading the work that the other committees will produce with regard to the other aspects of this campaign. While he will unavoidably touch on these other dimensions, he will undertake to minimise duplication with the reports of the other committees.

  10. In addition, your Rapporteur calls the attention of his colleagues to the General Report of Pierre Lellouche, of France. Mr Lellouche’s report contains a thorough analysis of the threats that face Alliance homelands, particularly from terrorism and ballistic missiles, and it highlights the dangers posed by the proliferation of WMD and the possibility that they might be used against our countries. That report will focus on the capabilities needed to meet these threats, in a more general sense.

  11. This report, then, will concentrate on the ongoing military campaign against terrorism, stemming from the September 11 attacks. It will begin with an overview of the campaign against the al-Qaeda network and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It will examine the co-operation that the United States has received from its NATO allies and from other countries that are assisting the fight against terrorism. This report will then look at how NATO countries might improve their abilities to act together against terrorism, including the idea of a joint NATO response force. It will then examine other campaigns in the war on terrorism, including the debate over possible military action against Iraq, before offering some final conclusions.

  1. MILITARY CAMPAIGN IN AFGHANISTAN


  1. On October 7, 2001, as this Committee was concluding its meeting in Ottawa, American aircraft based on carriers and elsewhere in the region initiated a bombing campaign over Afghanistan, signalling the start of the US counter-attack against al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that sheltered it. The ensuing campaign against the Taliban inspired doubts at first, but the precipitous collapse of their regime quickly silenced the doubters. The Taliban were driven from Kabul, the capital, on the night of November 12, and by December 6 they had lost control of the country, save a few isolated mountain pockets. An interim government under the leadership of Hamid Karzai took power in December, the same month that an international peacekeeping force was organised in Kabul. While the United States led this campaign, scores of friends and allies lent invaluable support, from countries that granted overflight rights to those who have land, sea and air forces fighting alongside American troops.

  2. According to Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, the deputy commander-in-chief of US Central Command, “What went down in Afghanistan went down the way it was supposed to: It was hard-hitting, it was lethal, and we got rid of al-Qaeda.” A major part of the campaign was unconventional warfare, working with anti-Taliban forces and using special operations troops to identify bombing targets. Those efforts enabled conventional marine and army units to establish a forward base in Afghanistan. Ultimately, Central Command officials said, the military campaign would give way to a civilian operation to stabilise the country and “prevent this from ever happening again.”

  3. Noting the unusual nature of the campaign, Steve Hadley, the deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush, said, “We had special forces on horseback calling in bombing strikes to support a cavalry charge by our Afghan allies. That’s not the type of warfare they trained for at West Point (the US Military Academy).”

  4. During this Committee’s visit to his headquarters in Tampa, Florida, Gen. Charles Holland, commander-in-chief of US Special Operations Command, and his staff provided details on the role of special forces in the campaign. They were able to infiltrate successfully into Afghanistan, where they served as a liaison between the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and US forces, particularly useful in linking coalition air power to Northern Alliance ground attacks. At the same time, the special forces were able to build a rapport with the local forces on the ground. Northern Alliance commanders, familiar with their adversary, provided those forces with lists of targets that the American forces could pass on for future air strikes to aircraft based in neighbouring countries in Central Asia, on aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea, on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and even in the continental United States.

  5. Also noteworthy was the close co-ordination between the US military and paramilitary intelligence officers. In combating a shadowy adversary, small units of special operations forces and intelligence operatives can be effective in finding small groups of terrorists. When American special forces arrived in Afghanistan on October 19, intelligence operatives had already been on the ground for three weeks, working with Northern Alliance commanders. This work laid a base for the Afghan campaign, identifying potentially friendly warlords, scouting Taliban positions and identifying weaknesses. Meanwhile, in the air, intelligence-gathering aircraft gave US commanders real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information.

  6. Although the success of the campaign in Afghanistan surpassed the expectations of most observers, enthusiasm has receded somewhat recently. While coalition forces succeeded in driving the Taliban from power in less than two months, and later operations uprooted a large number of al-Qaeda cells, scattered now in the remote parts of Afghanistan and other countries, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is still a great deal to be done to build a lasting peace in the country. Initial optimism about swift victory followed by the speedy establishment of peace gave way to intelligence reports that the Taliban is seeking to regroup in areas such as in the north-east region of Kunar, where the Afghan government has been unable to extend its authority. Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants are also said to be seeking to ally themselves with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former Afghan prime minister, who is thought to be in Kunar and is said to have recently met with Taliban leaders in his own country and in Pakistan, calling for a jihad to oust the Karzai government and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

  7. According to international press reports, recent unrest in Afghanistan is putting pressure on Turkey, which has led the 5,000-strong, 18-nation International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul since June 2002. Questions about the ISAF’s ability to promote stability in the Afghan capital are coming at a sensitive time, when the international community is pondering an expansion of the force’s mandate to cover other cities in Afghanistan. Assassination attempts on candidates for the Loya Jirga (grand council), and on Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, in September 2002, as well as the murder of senior Afghan officials (Abdul Qadir, the Afghan vice‑president, being the most prominent), reveal an unstable and volatile situation.

  8. For months, leaders of international aid organisations, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the country's interim and transitional governments, and even many "regional influentials" who control large swaths of the country have called for an expansion of the ISAF’s theatre of operations, currently limited to Kabul and the surrounding areas. The British decision to reduce its contribution from 4,000 troops to around 1,800 in June 2002, with no compensating increase by another ISAF contributor, is in contrast with requests for ISAF expansion, which would require increases in both forces and in operational tempo. In late August, following repeated calls by the Karzai government, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, said that ISAF should expand its role and geographic responsibility, but he promised no more than a minimal American contribution, a position that European allies have privately criticised. In late October, Germany, which with the Netherlands is to take over ISAF command at the end of this year, was to present a list of NATO assets, such as intelligence and planning, that it would like the Alliance to provide for ISAF. The force itself will be confined to Kabul and the surrounding region.

  9. Among the positive lessons learned from the Afghan campaign are the critical role that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and gunships played in operations. Indeed, operations in Afghanistan have convinced the Pentagon to include money for more UAVs in the new fiscal year 2003 budget, as well as money for more special operations AC-130 gunships. General Tommy Franks, the commander-in-chief of Central Command, has used UAVs to suppress Taliban air defences and AC-130s to blast terrorist targets from Tora Bora to Kandahar. The innovative use of ground-to-air communications, the high lethality and reliability of US air power and the importance of Special Forces in the success of operations have also been among the positive lessons derived from the Afghan campaign.

  10. Among the negative lessons include bombing errors, leading to the deaths in Afghanistan of four Canadian soldiers and hundreds of Afghan civilians. Although precision targeting has certainly improved since the Persian Gulf war, with 200 sorties today hitting roughly the same number of targets hit with 3,000 sorties during Desert Storm, some mistakes have been reported, most of them highlighted in a review by Global Exchange, an American organisation with field workers in Afghanistan.


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