國立政治大學國際事務學院「外交政策研究中心」網誌

The task here initially looked very daunting, because the Al Qaeda attacks had been planned from bases in the mountains of Afghanistan, a country which historically had proved most difficult for anyone, including 19th Century British and Russian imperialists, and the forces of the Soviet Union, to penetrate and invade,  and because pessimists might conclude that the entire Islamic world (including even a “secular” regime like the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq) was supporting the Al Qaeda attacks.

But, in the first round of the response to the 9/11 attacks, some good news seemed to emerge, to reduce the gloom. First, the entire world seemed to be sympathetic to the American need to invade Afghanistan, in face of the refusal of its Taliban regime to oust and hand over the Al Qaeda terrorist leadership. Putin’s Russia and Beijing and Islamic Pakistan and even the Iranians, seemed to agree that no country could tolerate Afghanistan’s hosting the perpetrators of such horrific terrorist attacks.

Because so much of American conventional fighting power was now tied up in Iraq, the Islamicist forces in Afghanistan in effect got a second wind, and have been mounting more of the kind of guerrilla campaign that was anticipated in 2002, and which had at the outset not materialized. Because the guerrilla war was more effective in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq, it spilled over to impose costs on Pakistan and on the pro-American regime of President Mushareff, with an ultimate loss of popularity (for this among many other reasons) so that he had to step down as President. And because the United States had seemingly painted all of the Islamic groups here together as the source of terrorism, Muslims in many corners of the region tended to accept this generalization, that the United States and the Muslim world were indeed enemies.

Complicating this a great deal, of course, were the facts that Pakistan had already acquired nuclear weapons, in response to India’s earlier decision to do so, and that Iran now seems intent on acquiring such weapons. The Bush administration’s decision in effect to forgive India for violating the barrier to nuclear proliferation seemed to confirm the impression, in Pakistan and elsewhere, that an alliance was emerging of non-Muslims opposed to Muslims..

Some of the problems here were unavoidable, including the inherent difficulty of defending against terrorist attacks anywhere around the world, and all the strains of suppressing guerrilla resistance, and the burdens of preventing the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. For as long as the United States feels strongly committed to defending Israel, and for as long as Arabs and other Islamic peoples see the existence of Israel as a fundamental injustice, there will be major resentment of the United States.

But these inherent problems were compounded by the tendency in the Bush administration to assume conspiracies and alliances among all of America’s enemies, including all the Islamic forces regardless of their theological differences, and even at times pulling in “godless” Communist North Korea.

At the minimum, the rhetoric of the Bush administration misread the details of the problems being faced. At the worst, it has amounted to a self-confirming hypothesis.