THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (134 page)

It is a cliché that generals prepare to fight the last war rather than the next one. But if it is such a cliché, why haven't the generals heard it—that is, why do we persist in modeling the future on the past?

The past, it turns out, is all we know about the future. Things are usually pretty much the way they have been. About modern warfare we can say three things based on the past: that it pits one country against another; that it is waged by governments, not private parties; that the victorious party defeats its adversary.

Now it happens that we are living in one of those relatively rare periods in which the future is unlikely to be very much like the past. Indeed the three certainties I just mentioned about national security—that it is national (not international), that it is public (not private), and that it seeks victory (and not stalemate)—these three lessons of the past are all about to be turned upside down by the new age of indeterminacy into which we are plunging.

W
AR IS NOT
a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided. As we have seen in the preceding pages, and as Conrad also wrote, “the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.”
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On September 11, 2001, the nascent community of market-states came to this knowledge as every society of states that preceded it has: through violence. In New York and in Washington, we slept that night among our own dead who were interred beneath rubble, as if on a battlefield.

The September attacks on the United States provide that country and its allies with an historic opportunity, even while they have dealt America an historic wound. That opportunity is the moment and the context in which to organize a grand coalition of states, with many of whose policies other
than counterterrorism the United States differs. Such coalitions, whose precise composition will shift from time to time and threat to threat, can be created and managed to fight a new epochal war composed of interventions against a variety of challenges that include terrorism—both within the State, as in the example of Serbia, and against the State, as in the case of the September attacks, and even by one state against its neighbor, as in the case of Iraq's aggression against Iran and Kuwait.

If a coalitional war against international terrorism prompts the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies to conduct cooperative operations at the leading edge of modern technology this war could forestall the cataclysmic conflicts among great powers that modern technology makes possible. Indeed I would say that there can be no higher priority for the United States and the United Kingdom than to strengthen cooperation with Russia in a league against international terrorism, even to the extent of transforming NATO. NATO could become the meeting ground for coalitional warfare against this lethal, global menace, and could include Russia as a full member. The September attacks can be understood as the first battle in this new war. If, as some historians argue, the twentieth century began in August 1914 it may be that the twenty-first century will be said to have begun in September 2001.

The multinational mercenary terror network that Osama bin Laden and others have assembled is a malignant and mutated version of the market-state. Like other emerging market-states, it is a reaction to the strategic developments of the Long War that brought forth cultural penetration, the liberalization of trade and finance, and weapons proliferation, on an unprecedented scale. Like other states, this network has a standing army; it has a treasury and a consistent source of revenue; it has a permanent civil service; it has an intelligence collection and analysis cadre; it even runs a rudimentary welfare program for its fighters, and their relatives and associates. It has a recognizable hierarchy of officials; it makes alliances with other states; it promulgates laws, which it enforces ruthlessly; it declares wars.

This network, of which Al Qaeda is only a part, greatly resembles a multinational corporation but that is simply to say that it is a
market-state
, made possible by advances in international telecommunications and transit, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. Lacking contiguous territory, Al Qaeda is a kind of virtual state, which means that our classical strategies of deterrence based on retaliation will have to be rethought. That is another way of saying that even when Afghanistan is conquered and pacified, the war against terrorism will go on.

Deterrence, assured retaliation, and overwhelming conventional force enabled victory for the coalition of parliamentary nation-states in the war
that began in 1914 and only finally ended with the Peace of Paris in 1990. These strategies cannot provide a similar victory at present because what threatens the states of the world now is too easy to disguise and too hard to locate in any one place. We cannot deter an attacker whose identity or location is unknown to us, and the very massiveness of our conventional forces makes it unlikely we will be challenged openly. As a consequence, we are just beginning to appreciate the need for a shift from the sole reliance on target, threat-based strategies to defensive, vulnerability-based strategies.

Realizing that we are fighting a virtual state and not just a stateless gang helps clarify our strategy. For one thing, it suggests that controlling and diminishing the revenue stream to bin Laden's network is far more impor-tant than capturing or killing any individual. For another, it clarifies the line between mere crime—which we use law, after the fact, to prosecute—and warfare, which we use strategy, before the fact, to anticipate.

The United States is at war no less than when a conventional state launched a surprise attack in 1941, and the assault this time has come for much the same reason. Now, as then, the United States aroused fear that her global presence would threaten the ambitions of a messianic state bent on regional subjugation and domination. Then as now the alliance of which the United States is a part faces a long and bitter struggle.

The world community faces its own historic challenge in creating a constitution for the international order that will emerge from this war. Will that community—the society of states—use the discredited multilateral institutions of the nation-state as a way of frustrating action in order to control the acts of its strongest member, the United States? Or will that society simply expect every state to defend itself as best it can, spiraling into a chaos of self-help, ad hoc interventions, and sabotage? Or will that community consist of islands of authoritarianism, whose institutions focus only inward in an attempt to prevent violence by harsh police methods? Or can we learn to produce
collective goods
—like shared intelligence and shared surveillance information from shared nanosensors and shared missile and cyber defenses? Indeed the production and distribution of collective goods
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—such as the coalition against international terrorism itself—may be the only way for a market-state to forestall peer competition and defeat international terrorism at the same time.

The phrase
Indian Summer
†
usually evokes a pleasant sensation of warm autumn weather that gives us a second chance to do what winter will make impossible. The origin of this phrase, however, is more menacing. The early American settlers were often forced to take shelter in stockades to protect themselves from attacks by tribes of Native Americans. These tribes went into winter quarters once autumn came, allowing the settlers to return to their farms. If there was a break in the approaching winter—a few days or weeks of warm, summery climate—then the tribal attacks would be resumed, and the defenseless settlers became their prey. Once again the settlers were forced to band together or to become victims, attacked one by one.