Reason, Cold and Careful
The Military Response to Terrorism


"Most professors and intellectuals don't like to think about things like slaughter and killing and violence," observes Arthur Waldron, the Lauder Professor of International Relations and an expert in Chinese history. "I mean you naturally avert your eyes from them, yet these are very, very central to human history."

Wielding War
Before coming to Penn in 1997, Waldron was a professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College, a graduate school for mid-career military officers. Its ten-month curriculum wends through course work in strategy and policy, national-security decision making, and military operations. Besides training professional warriors, the college also educates civilians from the State Department, the intelligence agencies, and other government posts that must bend war to the service of U.S. policy—a tricky proposition at best.

"Civilians, in particular, tend to overestimate the utility of force," says Waldron. He cites former President Clinton's failure to bring Slobodan Milosevic, onetime president of Serbia, back to the negotiating table with a massive NATO bombing campaign. "Just as a basic fluency with literature or economics or science should be part of every educated person's knowledge, so should an understanding of war be part of every citizen's education." His undergraduate course on Strategy, Policy, and War (History 160) tries to accomplish this by taking a look at the great strategists and war philosophers along with historical case studies dating back to the Peloponnesian War.

Waldron is partial to business suits, ties, and cufflinks, and wears a pin of the American flag on his lapel. In his book-lined office, where the word "war" pockmarks the shelves like bomb craters on a battlefield, there is a bronze statue of the Iwo Jima flag raising and a podium with a big Atlas of the World. There is also a soft Chinese shan shui (mountain/water) brush painting. "Although I teach war," he says, "it's not my only interest, and it's certainly not my love."

Besides teaching at Penn, he is the director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, which the New York Times likes to characterize with the epithet "conservative." He also serves on the U.S.-China Commission, an investigative body that advises Congress annually on the security and economic implications of relations between the two nations. Last year he was part of a top-secret team that reviewed the CIA's China intelligence.

"War is not a good thing or a safe thing," he declares, echoing King Archidamus of Sparta. The aged monarch tried without success to temper his young countrymen, who were eager to attack Athens during the Peloponnesian War. "Wars are mostly ghastly; they are protracted, wasteful, and destructive beyond all reason. Most would be better never initiated; many abandoned early on. But some have to be fought, and I believe this is one of them."

War on Terror
Terrorism is as old as history, he points out, but modern technology gives small and comparatively weak groups a "force multiplier" that allows them to do the kind of damage it used to take an army or an air force to do. Nineteen terrorists may be no match for the NYPD in a conventional war, but give them two fully fueled jetliners, which could be had with some careful planning and a few box cutters, and they can bring down a skyscraper, along with its inhabitants. With a little more resourcefulness and expertise, future terror operations may alter skylines with nuclear explosives or uncork some bottled pestilence conjured up by the burgeoning biotechnology industries. "There are a lot of people around the world with grievances who are looking for ways to amplify their message with some dramatic gesture," he says.

Although terror networks like Al Qaeda are relatively powerless, Waldron argues that terrorists can't be treated simply as criminals who are tracked down and apprehended by some global criminal-justice apparatus. The police arm of an international legal system would have to be at least as powerful as the United States, he says. To bring terrorists to a world court, the law enforcement body would need to coerce the nations protecting them as the U.S. has done in Afghanistan.

But even more than that, he contends, none of the penalties, including execution, are sufficient to deter future acts of terror. "If we want to beat terrorism, we're going to have to strike real fear into the heart of terrorists. In Afghanistan we're showing that we're tough and that if you cross us, bad things happen to you. That is much more likely to cause future terrorists to think twice."

The great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, he points out, stated it more bluntly: "The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms."

Waldron believes that the war on terrorism cooked up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has thus far put together the right mix of prudence, aggression, and smart planning. It is not simply a made-for-TV "fireworks display" of bombing that the previous administration limited itself to. The air strikes have been well targeted; the people associated with terrorism are being destroyed or captured, and there has been a greater willingness to send in ground troops and take casualties.

"We have to make clear that this is a war on extremists and terrorists," he stresses, "and not on Muslims. If it turns into the second, then we will have lost it before we have begun because even the United States lacks the resources to win a clash of civilizations."

After crippling Osama bin Laden's immediate network in Afghanistan, he says, we must sort through the rubble and interrogate Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners, following the "train of evidence" wherever it leads. One of the places he and many others have in mind is Iraq, which is known to have stockpiles of chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons. "We know that Saddam Hussein has no compunctions about using them on his own people," Waldron asserts. "All of his neighbors are scared of the Iraqi president and would like nothing more than to be rid of him. Sooner or later, we're going to have to go after him, or he's going to come after us or one of our allies."

In the Afghan campaign, the U.S. has demonstrated that it is a reliable and persistent ally, Waldron notes. If the evidence leads to Iraq—and the evidence has to be compelling to the Arab states and other allies—"then we have to design an operation that will in effect do to Iraq what we have done to Afghanistan, which is to replace the regime and neutralize its power to inflict massive military damage without causing general war and without killing too many innocent people."

The trick to winning support for such an operation, he says, is to re-establish U.S. credibility by showing that we can fight effectively, that we're not going to abandon our allies, and that we're "more to be feared" than Osama bin Laden or any other terrorists. "None of this is pretty," he warns. "All of this is ghastly. All of it is incredibly dangerous."

Unwieldy War
"Planning these things, you have to be smart," he says. "You have to figure it out; you can't just go in there and say, 'we're gonna bash you.'"

When he teaches History 160, Waldron takes his students to the Naval ROTC Headquarters to play out a war game. The simulations immerse the gamers in the volatility of war and strategy, and help them understand how unpredictable a tool war can be. In the fall he and 50 students, with the help of a retired U.S. Army colonel, played out a game that started at nine o'clock in the morning when a pro-Taliban, pro-bin Laden faction staged a coup in Pakistan.

"The scenario is far from unthinkable," Waldron notes. As the game progressed, the fundamentalists gained control of Islamic countries from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. The U.S. tried to salvage Pakistan by sending in military forces. It was not only defeated but driven out of Afghanistan as well. By three o'clock in the afternoon, the game ended with Pakistan and India on the brink of nuclear war over the Kashmir.

"The moves [in the war game] were made by smart, responsible Penn students and were quite plausible," he contends, "and our projections from them were quite cautious. Yet it proved what I have often said: Things can really go terribly wrong in war. In this case, things really went wrong for the United States. It was a complete catastrophe. I think everybody was sobered by it."

Like the war-wizened King Archidamus, our country is once more learning the bitter lessons of those who live beyond their youth: war is neither a good thing nor a safe thing. "But the terrorists are not going to stop by themselves," Waldron adds. "We have to stop them. That will require military and diplomatic wisdom. I am heartened by much of what I see. I am keeping my fingers crossed and my American flag pinned on my lapel."