U.S. citizens DEFEATING TERRORISM means adjusting the "national psyche" of Americans who do not yet comprehend that military power alone will not win such a war and who will resist losing personal liberties that defending U.S. soil may demand, local analysts say.
willing to fight
Americans are forced to
weigh their freedoms against
the risk of attackBy Christine Donnelly
cdonnelly@starbulletin.com"Normal military response is not enough. The only real role for the U.S. military when it comes to domestic terrorism is carrying out retaliation, quite frankly. And if you use that decisively enough you can reduce the prospects of future attacks if you can go in and wipe out terrorist cells. But as far as dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, it's not really a military mission," said Ralph Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum CSIS, a Honolulu-based foreign policy think tank affiliated with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
That point is underscored by the fact that while U.S. military retaliation is likely to be aimed first at Afghanistan, where the extremist Islamic Taliban government has harbored suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden in the past, some of the suicide pilots who actually carried out the attacks had been living and training in the United States for years.
"Who knows how many more are out there? It truly is a domestic problem as well as international problem and it will be a prolonged fight," said Richard Baker, adjunct senior fellow at Honolulu's East-West Center, an education and research center.
It is critical that the U.S. government and the American people as a whole limit their enmity to the "real enemies" and not spread it to all Islamic people and governments, Baker said. "I cannot overstate the importance of that. We cannot take the position of blame by (religious) association."
Cossa predicted that increased security in the aftermath of the attacks "probably will end up being more restrictive than we're comfortable with in our daily lives. So it will be very hard to sustain that. It's just not in our nature, or our national psyche, to have that kind of paranoia. Eventually, we'll just accept a certain amount of risk."
But some security steps, especially at airports, likely will last forever. Before Tuesday's attacks "the normal procedures to get on a plane -- scanning your luggage, going through a metal detector, showing ID, answering questions -- would have seemed pretty invasive 20 years ago," said Cossa. "Now it will get even more intrusive and over time we will get accustomed to it."
The U.S. Congress quickly approved $40 billion in emergency aid in the aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, with half of it to be spent in the devastated areas and the rest for improving anti-terrorism efforts and overall national security, including bringing the U.S. military to the highest level of preparedness.
U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, said it was too early to say how much of that money would eventually reach Hawaii, headquarters of the U.S. military's far-flung Pacific Command. Lt. Col. Stephen Barger, a spokesman for the Pacific Command, refused to speculate on any future operations.
Cossa, who helped developed strategy and policy for the Pacific Command before retiring from the Air Force, predicted the Pacific Command would play a secondary role in expected U.S. military retaliation, given that both Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan (a politically volatile country that has agreed to help the United States) are in the response region of the U.S. Central Command, headquartered in Tampa, Fla.
And he predicted that much of the new anti-terrorism spending would go to beefing up civilian security agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency and U.S. Border Patrol, plus other agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration and disaster relief such as the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
Resources also will go to the military Special Operations Command based in Tampa, Fla., including the Army Delta Force, Navy Seals and Air Force Special Operations, to beef up units whose highly trained members infiltrate enemy lines overseas, he said.
While many have criticized the U.S. defense and intelligence forces for failing to prevent the attack, Inouye did not join that chorus, saying they have "generally done well" despite inadequate federal funding.
"We have not been providing them with much money. That is changing now," said Inouye, who is chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee.
Inouye said he is willing to consider relaxing government restrictions agents say hamper intelligence-gathering, "but at the same time, we should not set aside the Constitution of the United States. Any major changes will have to be made in consultation with Congress. It's not a dictatorship," he said.
Besides the build-up in domestic anti-terrorism agencies and the U.S. military, how American civilians are viewed in the fight against terrorism marks one of the profound shifts in what President Bush has called "a new kind of war."
Civilian casualties have occurred in terrorist attacks before, even on American soil, as in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. But on Tuesday civilians were not only targets, but also fought back, if early reports are confirmed that some passengers on the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field resisted the hijackers. Government officials have said that plane likely missed its intended target; no one on the ground was killed.
"Several of my colleagues were referring to this as the Pearl Harbor of the new century, but I've been trying to tell them there's a big difference. On Dec. 7, the targets were all military. In this case, the only military target was the Pentagon, and even there many of the casualties were civilians," said Inouye, a decorated World War II veteran.
Now "it's the kind of war where people will have to be patient, be resolute, and they may have to be prepared, to -- well, suffer casualties, because I don't think that we can anticipate that the terrorist groups are going to roll up their tents and hide."
After the initial wave of anguish and rage subsides, plans on how to rebuild lower Manhattan will help indicate how much Americans are willing to adapt.
In the first few days after the World Trade Center was demolished, many officials, including New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, vowed the towering skyscrapers would be rebuilt. And Inouye said restoring the towers would "send a stunning message" that the United States would not be cowed by terrorists.
"After all, they were icons of our capitalistic system," he said.
But Baker takes a different view, noting that the WTC had already been repaired once, after it was bombed to less devastating effect by Islamic fundamentalists in 1993.
"I hope we don't talk ourselves into rebuilding those towers just to prove that we won't give in to terrorism. It doesn't make sense to put so many eggs in one, or in this case, two baskets," he said. "There's an element of human hubris in this. Taking smart precautions... is something that we need to do much more... consciously now. The age of innocence is over."
