In for the long haul

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WHEN TERRORISTS hit New York and Washington on September 11, the conventional wisdom was that the Bush administration would be reacting soon and with a firepower not seen in recent times. In fact the first pressures on the President were on similar lines - that if he waited he would be losing momentum.

But wiser counsel appears to have prevailed on Mr. George W. Bush. He has given the intelligence teams enough time not only to come up with what has happened but also for a broader assessment of who and what it was that hit America.

Beneath all the rhetoric of the President's ``Wanted Posters'' of Osama bin Laden or of his Defence Secretary, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld's pledge to ``drain the swamps'' the terrorists live in, there is the realisation from the President down that the campaign against terrorism is going to be long drawn.

In fact, if there is one thing that Mr. Bush has been saying from the very beginning it is that Americans need to have patience as the administration puts in place a comprehensive plan.

It may be the first war of the 21st century and against terrorism, but it is also the unconventional war of the century - an enemy with a possible name and a possible face, but with no permanent address. And this is what is making the retribution difficult, complex and tricky.

In spite of the temptation for the quick fix and the urge for the United States to look beyond Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden to Iraq and the Bekka Valley in Lebanon, the Bush administration has gone about this whole business in at least two ways.

First, without specifying the military targets, the Pentagon has been steadily building up its firepower in the Meditterranean, in the Persian Gulf and perhaps to some extent in the Arabian Sea. Battle groups are being moved - long range bombers to overseas bases and aircraft carriers into position.

At the same time, the elite Special Forces are getting ready. There could be some paratroop action; perhaps even small teams of Special Forces making their ways into the valleys and mountains of Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden and his bunch of terrorist hoodlums who have wreaked so much havoc.

For the military component - Operation Infinite Justice - to succeed or even make a worthwhile dent, the U.S. has to shore up its diplomatic component.

Even if Mr. Bush and his top advisers are repeatedly making the point that the war is not against Islam, but against un-Islamic terrorists, there is far too much scepticism in the Muslim world.

And Washington very much understands what it means to someone like General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to stick his neck out in support of the U.S.

The problem with coalition building at the State Department has been on at least three fronts: from the Islamic nations who are wary of being drawn into a scheme of things that is going to prove troublesome for their own internal societies and political survival; from nations such as Russia and China who are equally apprehensive of getting on the American bandwagon or giving any kind of a ``blank cheque'' to the Bush administration, even while holding out vague promises of cooperation.

And, finally, coalition building is coming under a lot of pressure and strain domestically from those conservatives who seem to be more interested in not losing the initial momentum than in looking at the issue in a wider perspective.

Which is why there is apprehension in the State Department and elsewhere that one sure and fast way to lose the coalition members is to put in place a strategy that attacks first and asks questions later.

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