You can't win a war without conviction

The ghosts of Vietnam with its slaughter and callous disregard for life (civilian as well as military, theirs as well as ours) continue to bedevil America's approach to war. Worried about casualties - theirs as well as ours - terrified of taking risks, emphasising the technological over the human, US military leaders have embarked on their first war in the 21st century. It is not surprising then that George Bush's war against the Taliban is looking more and more like the "wars" his predecessors waged against the enemies of the United States in the 1990s.

In those conflicts, the United States waged war from afar, using air attacks to degrade and destroy the enemy's capabilities, and only with great trepidation placed its ground forces in harm's way.

In late February 1991, only after an interminably long air campaign did a carefully planned US ground offensive grind forward. As a result, those portions of the Iraqi army that mattered to Saddam's survival escaped to wreak a terrible vengeance on those Iraqis foolish enough to revolt. In 1993 the fear of causing civilian casualties so upset Bill Clinton that he fired off a night-time barrage of cruise missiles at the headquarters of the Iraqi secret police operatives responsible for an attempt to blow up Bush senior during a visit to Kuwait. The result was several dead janitors, but no dead secret policemen. To reinforce the impression that the present is more closely connected with the past than many in Washington would admit, on the war's first day General Tommy Franks turned down the CIA's request to fire the "Hellfire" missiles on board a Predator circling over Mullah Omar's hideout on the advice of his Central Command lawyer.

As the air war enters its 19th day, there are questions worth raising, even given the paucity of real information coming out of central Asia. After a considerable period of build-up with the movement of massive US forces to the Middle East, the campaign against Osama bin Laden and his friends, the Taliban, began in the "new" American fashion with strikes aimed at taking down Afghanistan's air defence system, a system that even without the destruction of the last decade could hardly have been anything but rudimentary.

Meanwhile, further strikes targeted the command and control network (is the Taliban capable of controlling its military forces in a Western sense?); supply dumps throughout the country (could the Taliban actually move large volumes of supplies?). Finally, a single ground raid hit Mullah Omar's headquarters (long since abandoned) to capture what - the paperwork of a non-existent government? One wonders if the US generals running this war understand the nature of an enemy that looks nothing like the governments the West confronted in the 20th century.

In the meantime a kabukilike dance has taken place in Washington to determine whether the United States and its Allies should aid the Northern Alliance (about which at least the Taliban and its friend Bin Laden worried enough to assassinate its leader). At present a few desultory strikes by fighter bombers have taken place on Taliban positions in northern Afghanistan. When queried by newsmen, Pentagon spokes persons suggested that the front-line positions between Taliban and Northern Alliance forces were too close to risk B-52 strikes. Yet it is the psychological impact of B-52 strikes that has had the greatest impact on enemy forces in past conflicts (the B-52 was the most feared aircraft by Iraqi soldiers during the Gulf War despite the fact that it missed most of its targets because its bombing computers were misprogrammed).

This is supposedly a war to destroy Bin Laden and his terrorist organisation. The Taliban has provided enthusiastic support for that unholy crew, and it deserves to share Osama's fate. Yet Washington seems more worried about US casualties (not to mention collateral casualties) and the impact of the war on Afghan istan's neighbours than about waging a swift and effective campaign to wreck the Taliban and kill Bin Laden. Part of the fault may lie in the inheritance of a bureaucratised, politically correct military leadership that Bush inherited from Clinton; part of it undoubtedly lies in a Department of State more interested in representing foreign interests than those of the United States. But the President's Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has had the opportunity to shake the Department of Defence up, and he has chosen not to do so.

Thus, we are seeing a military-campaign unfold with stodgy slowness, one that could have, and perhaps already has had, a number of important consequences. The Taliban seems to be adjusting to the air strikes, and by its very nature is a dispersed, decentralised force, hardly open to disruption by the bombing of its command and control centres. More ominously Bin Laden has had time to disperse and move his network. His operatives will strike again somewhere in the civilised world in the near future. And most worrisome of all, the longer the war continues, the greater are the chances that major destabilisations will occur in the Islamic world.

Abraham Lincoln spent much of the first two years of his presidency in energising a group of generals who found every reason not to move. The cost was the terrible blood-letting of the US Civil War. We in the West have already suffered in excess of 4,000 killed in the Twin Towers disaster (along with a major attempt to kill innocents with anthrax). It would seem that our leaders and their generals need to show more speed, focus (this is after all about destroying the Taliban as well as Bin Laden), and ruthlessness in the campaign in Afghanistan. Our message to the fanatics in the Islamic World should be similar to the one the Romans sent their world at Masada: "We will come and get you, whatever the price, whatever the cost, if you attack us."

? Williamson Murray is Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University.