THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (121 page)

THE MEADOW

SECURITY

In September of the first year of the new millennium, the United States was struck by a terrorist atrocity on a scale that dwarfed previous attacks. Perhaps as many as six teams of airplane hijackers attempted to take over commercial aircraft and fly them into a set of targets that included the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington; three teams succeeded. A death toll in the thousands was the result.

The terrorist teams were linked to a shadowy Arab leader who was believed to control a mercenary and religious network of zealots in many countries, but was based in the state of Afghanistan, which had, for four years, been controlled by a fundamentalist movement known as the Taliban. Allied to this movement, this charismatic leader trained thousands of terrorist fighters in Afghan camps.
Now the United States demanded that the Taliban dismantle the camps and turn over the terrorist leadership.

For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article Five of its founding charter, declaring that the atrocities were an attack on the alliance. The United Nations' Security Council adopted a resolution authorizing states to employ “all necessary means” to prevent future terrorist acts. Despite these moves, the United States chose to assemble a multistate coalition not limited to NATO nor acting under U.N. authority.
At the center of this coalition are the American president, the British prime minister, and the Russian president.

The first week in the following October the coalition began its attacks on Afghanistan, largely using American air assets to conduct a bombing campaign and relying on indigenous Afghan forces to defeat the Taliban on the ground
. That same week a Russian airliner flying from Israel to Siberia exploded in mid-air and crashed into the Black Sea. The next week a letter seeded with anthrax arrived at the office of the U.S. Senate's majority leader. Similar letters were found in various offices, including those of other senators, media outlets, and postal sorting centers. In mid-November an American passenger jet crashed into a residential neighborhood in New York City. None of these events—the airliner crashes or the anthrax mailings—were ever conclusively tied to the militant Muslim conspiracy but nor were they definitively investigated.

By December Taliban forces had disintegrated and some of the senior leadership of the terrorist network had been eliminated. There remained, however, a decade of warfare ahead. During this period the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels into New York City, as well as the Chunnel connecting France and the United Kingdom, were attacked with explosives and
collapsed. The National Cathedral in Washington, the Central Synagogue in New York, the John the Baptist site on the Jordan River, and the gothic cathedral at Chartres were all targets of attacks or attempted attacks by terrorists.

International civil aviation was renationalized and taken over by governments when it became impossible to maintain profitably
. This was the result of repeated bombings on aircraft and at airports, including London's Heathrow and the Los Angeles terminal known as LAX and the destruction of a Concorde after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle.

The consequence of these horrors on the law of the countries struck was relatively consistent in The Meadow.
Thousands of persons were arrested and detained without charge; some were tortured and beaten to extract information. Nonjudicial tribunals were sometimes used to convict those arrested
when it appeared that they might go free under traditional rules of criminal procedure or when it was feared the ongoing threat posed by their co-conspirators was too great to risk the exposure of intelligence assets required for a successful prosecution.

Nothing seems to work to stop these attacks until two developments, one political, one technological, converge. For three decades the leaders of the most influential economies have been meeting informally, at first to discuss particular crises, and later to seek consensus on the development of the society of the market-states. Originally called the Group of Seven (G-7) by the press, the membership of this group had changed eventually to encompass a political group (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Japan, German, Russia) and an economic group (adding China).

At the G-9 (P8) meeting, the U.S. president proposed an ad hoc intelligence coalition to be financed by voluntary subscriptions by members of the society of states, and empowered to share information on a global scale.
The G-9 (P8) meeting was no more than a forum; it took no position as a group on the president's proposal. In the case of anti-Western terrorism, funding for this intelligence institution was initially contributed by Saudi Arabia, Japan, Russia, Turkey, Germany, Britain, and the United States.
For the first time, cooperation among the world's financial institutions (prompted by the solidarity shown among finance ministers and central bankers) yielded substantial progress in tracking and interdicting the financing of terrorism.

Careful investigative work by units of this institution was responsible for uncovering an Iraqi attempt to use the terrorist network for a nuclear attack—actually a conventional explosive that would disseminate radioactive materials, the so-called dirty bomb—against the city of Washington in 2007. But the G-9 successes were marred by an attack that used a device apparently loaded onto a container ship in Antwerp, off-loaded in
Canada, and detonated by satellite signal while on a train that passes through Chicago. No one ever really determined the source of this attack. The terrorist network denied responsibility, but then they had adopted the tactic of denial sometime past. Ultimately Iraq is blamed and this provided the decisive impetus for an invasion. A slightly different coalition was organized to provide an expeditionary force.

The former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had been removed by 2004 but his successor, a Baath party functionary of Iranian descent, had continued the predatory policies of his predecessor. The new expeditionary force, composed of troops hitherto delegated to NATO commands by the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, launched an airborne assault, seizing Baghdad, and meeting up with an amphibious offensive from the Persian Gulf, joined by overland elements of the same force from Kuwait.

Only, however, when the G-9 coalitions were aided by technological breakthroughs in nanosensors—which could detect the molecular presence of weapons of mass destruction—and in global surveillance systems did terrorism on a catastrophic scale finally abate in 2015.

The success of this innovative coalitional arrangement against terrorism led to several structural reforms:
first the G-9 (P8) members announced a series of rules for intervention, including commitments to deliver humanitarian assistance
. In every situation, a G-9 (P8) member had to propose an intervention and raise the funds for the operation, provided only that a simple majority of the Group endorse the effort. The actual forces used are contributed on a cost-plus basis, and are placed under the unified command of the state organizing the intervention. Relying on the widespread belief that democratic regimes do not wage aggression, the G-9 (P8) is in effect offering a substantial security subsidy—through a kind of extended deterrence, that is, the promise of protection against aggression—to those states that adopt and maintain democratic regimes. At the same time, by promising to intervene against international terrorism and ethnic cleansing, and to treat epidemics and famine, the G-9 (P8) linked human rights to liberal constitutionalism, regardless of the democratic nature of the affected regime, thus reserving to itself the right to compromise the sovereignty of any state when it is unwilling, or unable, to protect a group of its own citizens from mass depredations.

This policy was tested over the next decade and a half in regions as diverse as South Asia
(where a Sri Lankan revolutionary regime attempted to slaughter ethnic Hindus),
South Africa
(where a democratic government was temporarily deposed by a coalition of white supremacists and African separatists),
and Latin America
(where a Guyanese dictator refused to permit humanitarian aid to stem a smallpox epidemic). It may be judged a success in retrospect, but it did not operate in isolation. The G-9 (P8)
directorate was greatly aided by three factors that tended to stabilize and enhance its impact.

First, the war against terrorism was a conflict all the great powers could unite on. Each faced the threat of attacks on its own modernity and the secular nature of its state.
Thus Russia and China were no less willing to join the coalition against terrorism than were France and Japan.

Second, as they developed increasing confidence in the G-9 (P8) plan, most
states were able to divert more funds away from military expenditures in their own budgets
, thus accelerating their economic growth and allowing for higher payments to fund G-9 (P8) expeditionary forces. Failure to do so meant effective exclusion from the decision making process of the world's leadership.

Third, the G-9 (P8) states were able to develop a comprehensive system of nanosensors, satellite surveillance, and ballistic missile defense that provided a limited shield against weapons of mass destruction
. The sheer investment required by such an effort could only have been feasible by a multinational consortium; when finally deployed, this system had the additional effect of rendering the G-9 (P8) more credible, because, at least for a time, it seemed impossible to threaten G-9 (P8) states (as Iraq had threatened Israel at the time of the Gulf War) with long range retaliation by modest or disguised forces. This tended to quiet various regional enmities (like that of China, India, and Pakistan) where states had “gone nuclear.”

Russian participation in the G-9 (P8) force structure had the wholesome effect of tying the new Russian state to the world's most influential economies. This had a stabilizing effect on politics within Russia, and enhanced Russia's prestige vis-à-vis the bordering states of the former Soviet Union. At the same time that Russian forces were ever willing to join ad hoc expeditions (for which they were well paid), the Kremlin was also more willing to resort to G-9 (P8) mediation over the autonomy campaigns of the Chechens and others.

On the other hand, this informal system had the effect of weakening the U.N. and its associated peacekeeping institutions to the vanishing point.
Gradually, the United States reduced its funding to about 10 percent of the total budget, an 80 percent cut
. Other multilateral security institutions adapted:
NATO, for example, jettisoned its unanimity rule for the North Atlantic Council and transformed itself into a rapid reaction force for hire.

This ad hoc system was sorely tested, however, in 2018. The South Korean government was in the final stages of negotiation with North Korea over a federal reunification plan, to be financed by a huge South Korean subsidy, when labor unrest in the South broke into mass riots against the government. Although the riots initially erupted in Seoul, they soon spread to other cities and were most violent in the southern port of Pusan. Here a provisional government led by a workers' party proclaimed its independence
in May, after six weeks of revolt; this government called upon the North for aid when it was reported that troops from Seoul were bound for Pusan to quell the insurrection. The North responded with such alacrity that it is clear that some sort of collusion with the rioters was already in place. Northern troops poured across the border in two columns, advancing down the Chorwan Valley and the Kaesong-Murasan Approach against Seoul. Intelligence sources indicated that, as had been expected since the 1960s, this was to be a direct strike against Seoul, but in fact the city was partly encircled and then bypassed as the Northern forces split, one group streaking south toward Pusan, the other army group attempting to trap some 15,000 U.S. troops outside Taegu.
These U.S. forces were the last remnant of the American post–Cold War force stationed on the Asian mainland; they had been stripped of their tactical nuclear weapons in 1991
. When the American forces were virtually surrounded, and the North Korean main force had entered Pusan, the Pusan provisional regime contacted Washington, offering to barter a peaceful withdrawal of American forces. Washington faced a dilemma: either it would risk the annihilation of its forces in an attempt to intervene to save them and to shore up the Seoul government, or it would shatter its security commitments in an ignominious evacuation. Intervention would require the reintroduction of nuclear weapons, a move strongly opposed by Japan, where the only other American forces in the area were stationed,
the U.S. base at Okinawa having reverted to Japanese sovereignty
.

It was never imagined that the G-9 (P8) ad hoc forces would confront a challenge of this magnitude; they were mainly expeditionary in nature. In any case,
Japan blocked G-9 (P8) action
by successful lobbying, out of concern that nuclear weapons might ultimately be used in the Korean peninsula with incalculable consequences for Japan. U.S.
appeals to China for diplomatic mediation were rebuffed
, partly, it was surmised, because China wished to remove Korean economic competition from its own export markets. In any case,
China vetoed a resolution in the U.N Security Council condemning the Northern invasion.

It remained unclear for some weeks whether North Korea had produced its own nuclear weapons, using reactors it had been given in the 1990s to replace the heavy-water reactors it was then relying on. Although the replacement reactors were less useful in producing fissile material for weapons, they could have served this role and there were no definitive sources of intelligence either way. This possibility added to the complexity of the American position.