But you don't get to post-Taliban until you've defeated the Taliban. And you don't defeat the Taliban with antiseptic attacks on fixed installations and pinpoint raids on front-line positions. You do it by scaring the living hell out of the enemy, producing in him the rational calculation that you're going to win and he'd better change sides...
The error began in the very naming of the mission. It started out as Infinite Justice. But we could not have that, we were told, because it might offend Muslims, who believe that infinite justice comes only from God. (Don't Christians and Jews believe that too? Were they offended?) So we changed it to Enduring Freedom. Very nice. Too nice. We should have called it Righteous Might, the phrase Franklin Roosevelt used in his Pearl Harbor speech to describe what the enemy would now be facing.
Instead, the enemy today is facing calibration and proportionality. The "Powell Doctrine" once preached overwhelming force to achieve victory...
Yet we have held back...why are we giving the Taliban sanctuary in their cities? We could drop leaflets giving civilians 48 hours to evacuate, after which the cities become legitimate military targets. We know our enemy is planning more mass murder. Every day of urban safety for them is another day of peril for innocent Americans.
Restraint has already cost a lot. An important element of winning is psychological shock, the key to demoralization, defection and disintegration. We have squandered it. Now that the first wave of American power has come and gone, the Taliban are ever more convinced of American uncertainty and of their own indestructibility...
Half-measures are for wars of choice, wars like Vietnam. In wars of choice, losing is an option. You lose and still survive as a nation. The war on terrorism, like World War II, is a war of necessity. Losing is not an option. Losing is fatal. This is no time for restraint and other niceties. This is a time for righteous might.
Charles Krauthammer, Oct. 31.2001, Not enough might,
One gram, or one twenty-eighth of an ounce, of such high-grade anthrax can hold up to 100 billion spores, said Ken Alibek, a former top official of the Soviet germ weapons program who is now president of Advanced Biosystems Inc., a consulting company in Manassas, Va. Estimated conservatively, at 10,000 spores to a lethal dose, one gram in theory could cause about 10 million deaths.
Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican whose office last week was found to be contaminated with a few spores, said in an interview that he had been told by federal investigators that the letter sent to Mr. Daschle contained two grams of anthrax -- enough to make about 20 million lethal doses, assuming it could be distributed with perfect efficiency
...if the two grams of anthrax powder sent to the Senate in a letter had instead been scattered at the building's air intake, the results could have ranged from catastrophic to nothing at all. The outcome, he said, would depend on the quality of the air system.
"If the filters were good &emdash; and that's a big if &emdash; two grams of the stuff going into the air intake wouldn't have killed anybody," Dr. Gadgil said. "But if they were lousy, it would have killed everyone." (This, of course, assumes that the attack went undetected and that no one received treatment.)
Assessing Risks, Chemical, Biological, Even Nuclear
- Source: The New York Times
- Published: November 1, 2001
Over the years, countries have come up with simpler designs for nuclear weapons, making it much more likely that a shoestring operation inside Afghanistan could build one, Mr. Albright said.
Except for the suitcase bomb, any one of those weapons would probably have to be brought to the United States in a ship, perhaps hidden in a container on a freighter. The bombs could fit into a large van and, if exploded in downtown Manhattan, might cause tens of thousands to a hundred thousand deaths, Mr. Albright said.
A cruder but simpler way to use radioactive materials as a weapon would be to construct a radiological bomb, sometimes called a dirty bomb. The idea is to kill and terrorize with radiation alone, by packing radioactive material around an ordinary explosive and detonating it above a city.
The radioactive material could spread as a dust emanating from the explosion, falling on a wide area of a city, perhaps killing hundreds and requiring a cleanup that could run to billions of dollars. Without a cleanup, the material would cling to surfaces and contaminate the area for decades.
These dirty bombs are much easier to engineer than nuclear bombs. But because of the known sympathies of many Pakistanis for Al Qaeda, one threat easily stands out, said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md.
"There's so many vulnerabilities," Dr. Makhijani said, but "the most immediate danger relates to Pakistani nuclear weapons."
- Ashcroft's Warning: Dirty Bomb
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- Dirty' Bomb Could Wipe Out Thousands
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- Source: London Times
- Published: October 26, 2001
- Source: London Times
- Nigel Hawkes On Bin Laden's Secret Secretweapon
- Nuclear Terrorism, the ultimate nightmare, could come in many forms, say experts who have studied the possibilities. The least likely of all is the explosion of a nuclear warhead, although there are thousands in the world. To achieve that, a terrorist group would either need to acquire a complete warhead from one of the current nuclear weapons powers, or the material and the know-how to make its own. While neither is impossible, they do not make much sense from a terroristís point of view. Much simpler, and equally terrifying, would be to create ...
- Playing Dirty
- First airplanes, now anthrax, could radiological weapons be next?
- A look at "dirty nukes," the weapons we ignore at our peril.
- First airplanes, now anthrax, could radiological weapons be next?
by Bo Crader
10/19/2001
WASHINGTON TIMES PENTAGON REPORTER Bill Gertz reported last week that U.S. officials believe Osama bin Laden may possess raw radioactive material, the source material for a radiological weapon, a so-called "dirty nuke." A 1999 Air Command and Staff College report by Major Scott Nichelson and Major Darren Medlin describes such radiological weapons as a "credible threat" to the United States, predicting that "a radiological terrorist attack will probably occur in the near future." ...
ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE: WHERE IS TRUMAN WHEN WE NEED HIM?
by Mia T
October 30, 2001
Asymmetrical warfare, by definition, precludes the anticipation of every terrorist act, the plugging of every terrorist hole. Listen carefully to Cheney and Ashcroft. Their warnings and predictions are a reflection of this plain fact, the logical extension of which is that all American lives are at risk. That there have been "only" several thousand casualties, thus far, is entirely a function the terrorist's whim.
Asymmetrical warfare requires asymmetrical,, disproportionate, preemptive, non-linear, non-cartesian, non-discrete, out-of-the-box thinking and acting. The United States response, by contrast, is symmetrical, measured, reactive, linear, cartesian, discrete, pedestrian, formulaic, predictable, political.
Where is Truman when we need him?.
Letter from Truman to Irv Kupcinet, August 5, 1963 :
