A shadow war America may not win

I know, it sounds rather sacrilegious declaring even before the first gun is fired, the first missile launched, the first bomb dropped on enemy territory that the United States of America may have declared a war it cannot win. Our minds still remain glued to the wanton and abominable destruction of Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington and the pounding is still there, the rage, the ugly throb, white-knuckled fists and raised to retaliate against the Islamic terrorists on the instant and evict them from the face of the earth. As America’s collective grief subsides, the war drums beat a constant tattoo. The blood curdles. And George W. Bush sounds more like a Watusi warrior than a president of the United States of America. His is now the script of the Wild, Wild West: "Get them dead or alive. Smoke them out and get them running."

But the initial results don’t lend themselves to jubilant commendation.

First, the ruling Taleban in Afghanistan refuses to hand over Osama bin Laden to the US, a rejection that is a humiliating sword slash on the face of America. Taleban is saying: Give us adequate evidence that indeed Bin Laden was behind the terrorist assault September 11. In the process, the Taleban defies the whole military might of America to pour its wrath on Afghanistan. To boot, this was a failure of Pakistan’s military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf who virtually gave Washington the assurance he could bend the Taleban to his will and as a result deliver Osama bin Laden on a silver platter. Now Musharraf himself is shaking from the headwinds of Muslim fundamentalism in his own country.

This is the dilemma facing US President George W. Bush and his first-line Praetorian guards of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser, the mask-faced Condoleeza Rice.

They had and have the most fordmidable military force ever assembled in all the history of mankind, ultra-sophisticated missiles that could hit a dollar coin from many miles distant, armies, navies and fighter-bomber aircraft that could bomb an enemy country to the Pleistocene age, intercontinental ballistic missiles that could destroy the world many times over. War planes without pilots that can exercise surveillance on an enemy city for days on end.

And yet here they were, still unable to move ten days after that Days of Infamy September 11.

Symbolically, they had narrowed the enemy to the bearded visage of Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush promising he would smoke him out and get him "dead or alive." Now they don’t even know where Bin Laden is. Has he escaped? Don’t laugh, but there are repeated rumors he was evacuated to Muslim Mindanao, where he has twice been in the past distributing the largesse of his terrorist organization Al Qaeda (The Base) within the jungled fastnesses of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Ustadz Hashim Salamat, MILF supreme, has admitted meeting him twice. It appears Osama was not yet bearded the first time, and was described as "remarkably handsome" by those who saw him.

Anyway. Despite the negative picture, despite the utterances of Soviet generals who were veterans of the ill-fated Soviet invasion of Afghanistan who said a war of invasion was "unwinnable" in that moon-scarred and moon-cratered country, the US will have no choice but to plunge swinging and screaming into Afghanistan. If they don’t, they will lose this shadowy war by default, something unthinkable and unacceptable to the American mind. If they do, they could get into a guagmire worse than Vietnam where US ground troops will probably suffer more casualties than they did at Normandy. The Taleban guerrillas live to kill and kill ruthlessly in Afghan terrain where there are a million hiding places. The invader has been known to flee in utter terror.

Yes, of course, we Filipinos wish the Americans well. The US is our second country and we wear democracy on our sleeve like a totem even if we haven’t served democracy well, or vice versa.

But the reality is something else. We would be crazy sending combat troops to fight alongside the American military. If we can’t even subjugate the Abu Sayyaf down south, the Filipino soldier would be mincemeat in Afghanistan and wherever he finds himself seeking to slay the terrorists and pull out their network root and branch in 50 to 60 countries. Unlike General Musharraf of Pakistan who bargained and got a deal from the US – counted of course in the billions of dollars – our government led by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo simply disrobed and told the Americans – we are yours.

* * *

Apropos of this, President George W.Bush sought a pledge from French President Jacques Chirac to sever economic ties with Iran and Iraq. And Chirac, of course, said no. There is a politics of war as there is a politics of oil. And Bush, a neophyte in international affairs, didn’t or couldn’t make this distinction. The US, with its huge oil reserves, with Alaska waiting to be opened up for its massive deposits of gas and oil, can probably do without Middle East or Arab oil. Not so the countries of Europe, Japan, China and many other countries. Yes, including the Philippines. In the war against Islamic terrorism, it is not likely at all that America will invade and occupy oil-producing Arab countries simply because they are harboring or even financing Islamic terrorist organizations.

So how will the Americans flush or smoke out the terrorists, dismantle their cells and organizations which are not permanent, which move or transfer or relocate as the circumstances demand, an army of faceless men and women strung all over the world.

Where just so many years ago, the profile of the Islamic terrorist was Ramsey Youssef, the bearded, prognathous, feral-eyed fanatic who was in Manila to plot the assassination of Pope John Paul II and the hijack of some Philippine Airlines planes after having been involved in the Twin Towers bombing in 1993, today the terrorists who upended Twin Towers and the Pentagon are young, educated college or university students or graduates taking flying and other courses in the US and Germany, speaking fluent English. They easily melt into the middle class culture of America, live very normal lives, drive a medley of modern cars. They are clean-shaven, raise families and we are made to understand their network includes Arab-Americans who have lived two decades in the US.

So how can you root them out?

Already, the signs are ominous. Arab-Americans in America fear for their lives. Some have been stoned, harassed and insulted in public places, jeered at, told to get out of America. We haven’t forgotten what happened after Pearl Harbor. The US government ordered the internment of all Japanese-Americans, herded them into concentration camps, the hated and reviled Nissei. They were, of course, innocent, Japanese-Americans who spoke perfect Yankee English who imbibed American culture, who suffered virtual prison humiliation during the four years of the Second World War. The US government, realizing its blunder after the war, apologized, and made amends.

It is not the purpose of this column to lay blame.

We are simply applying history’s magnifying glass to what is happening today. And even as we strongly and angrily denounce what happened in New York and Washington, multipolarization and a multicivilized world opens up so many faces, so many cultures, so many religions, so many faiths, so many scriptures, so many denominations, so many cults, so many gods and demi-gods.

America is facing the terrorist face of Islam today. Tomorrow America may be facing China and after China possibly India, and of course Japan. We are all fast learning the world doesn’t stand still, that as we look back, years back, decades, generations and centuries back, the flow of history has been constant and never stopped.

But we are, in a sense, hypnotized by the three commercial aircraft used as sky daggers by the terrorists to sink into the heart of commercial America and military America, killing more than 5000 swept into a kind of hell they never imagined. Nothing in history was ever like this. Nothing. Wars were always definable, victory and defeat up for grabs. There was always a conqueror and a conquered, countries or continents held captive, weaker nations surrendering to or held captive by stronger nations. Now America is in a war it hardly understands because it is a shadow war, defying all conventional wisdom, no visible fronts, no fixed battlefields, no massed enemies rising to conquer or be conquered. To win this war, to persevere in this war, America will have to peel off as a boa constrictor peels off its skin, learn from and perhaps imitate the enemy, resort to terror, get inside a cave, wield a club and behave like a beast. Not that it likes to, but America will be forced to.

Maybe Barbara Tuchman was right after all when she said: "We can only muddle on as we have done in those same three or four thousand years, through patches of brilliance and decline, great endeavor and shadow."