Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [196]
Some critics suggested that the administration overreacted to the 9/11 attack. Their contention was that the terrorism problem and the challenge of radical Islamism were not and are not large enough to have justified a war on terrorism. I disagree. Islamist totalitarian ideology fuels an international movement that considers the United States and the West as enemies—not just of their movement but of God. Adherents to their extremist ideology are passionate, often fanatical, and certain in their conviction that their holy mission is to destroy their enemies utterly and without mercy. They have the advantages of being able to use Western technologies, gain access to international travel, and exploit the openness of liberal democratic societies and free people, all of which enable them to cause us great harm—harm of a magnitude many multiples of what we experienced on 9/11.
Lenin once said, “The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.” By sowing fear, terrorists seek to change our behavior and alter our values. Through their attacks, they trigger defensive reactions that could cause us to make our societies less open, our civil liberties less expansive, and our official practices less democratic—effectively to nudge us closer to the totalitarianism they favor. I thought our priority should be to maintain our free society and our values, and to not be terrorized into altering our free way of life. I had learned in Beirut in 1983 that a terrorist can attack any place and at any time of his choosing, using any conceivable technique. It is not physically possible to defend against terrorists day and night in every location, against every method of attack. In order to maintain our civil liberties and the sense of security Americans take pride in, we needed to go on the offensive.
In a way we made it easier for critics to discount the danger of terrorism, because the administration succeeded in our strategic goal: preventing additional attacks on the United States. There were attempts, but they were foiled. The institutions, laws, and policies that the President initiated contributed to discovering and deterring those attacks. For all the criticism the administration received, some no doubt deserved, one fact remains: Anyone who lived through 9/11 never would have believed that almost a decade later there would not have been another successful attack on our soil. That this was avoided was not the result of good luck. Rather, it was the result of an aggressive, unrelenting offensive against the enemy. The ultimate credit for that belongs to President George W. Bush.
The Taliban had heard demands and complaints from American administrations before. Nothing significant had come of them. “We don’t foresee an attack against us,” said the Taliban foreign minister, “because there is no reason for it.”22
Taliban officials undoubtedly believed that Afghanistan’s forbidding geography would discourage anything but a cosmetic military effort. After all, they had heard President Clinton declare after a previous bin Laden attack in 1998 that Afghanistan had “been warned for years to stop harboring and supporting these terrorist groups. But countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens…. There will be no sanctuary for terrorists.”23
Things were different now. And if the Taliban believed America was bluffing, they miscalculated.
PART IX
Into the Graveyard of Empires
Afghan-Uzbek Border
FEBRUARY 15, 1989