The Advantage of Speed
Colin Powell has come out for an accelerated campaign against the Taliban.

October 23, 2001 5:00 p.m.

olin Powell has come out for an accelerated campaign against the Taliban. He's on the right track, for a practical diplomatic reason, but for a much deeper one as well.

The diplomatic consideration is simply that if the Pakistani government is experiencing domestic unrest because of our bombing campaign, the last thing we want to do is extend our bombing campaign.

This is why it was probably a mistake in the first place to try to placate the Pakistani government by leaving Taliban front-line troops intact to block Northern Alliance troops from sweeping into Kabul.

This too-cute tactic served only to drag out the very bombing that Pakistan finds objectionable, by delaying its ultimate and inevitable political objective: toppling the Taliban.

Yes, it's important for the U.S., one way or another, to help forge a post-Taliban government, and the fact that the administration hadn't thought hard about this before beginning the bombing campaign was a mistake (a particularly conservative mistake, as I argued in the New York Post yesterday).

But now that the bombing has been underway for three weeks, we should just be focusing on ousting the Taliban and worry about picking up the political pieces later. The deeper lesson here is that delay and half-measures are usually a mistake in military campaigns, and in geopolitics generally.

Half-measures often serve only to inflame an enemy, without achieving the benefit of the objective sought in the first place. In the case of Afghanistan, for instance, bombing the Taliban halfheartedly apparently outraged Pakistani public opinion without really furthering our objective of destroying the Taliban.

The bombing campaign in Afghanistan was like removing a Band-Aid, really slowly. But perhaps the foremost example of the folly of half-measures in the Middle East is our Iraq policy.

One of Osama bin Laden's grievances is the U.S.-supported sanctions against Iraq. The purpose of the sanctions is to oust Saddam Hussein, but since it is a singularly ineffective way to do that it serves only to create a complaint against the U.S. while leaving Saddam in power: the worst of both worlds.

Indeed, if we're looking for hints from bin Laden about how U.S. policy should be changed in the Mideast — as apparently some critics of Israel are — then maybe we should take the step that would make it possible to remove the sanctions immediately and forever: a direct assault on Saddam that destroys his regime.

Delaying, and skirting around the real issue — Saddam's continued existence in power — is a formula for political and diplomatic problems without the ultimate upside of a Saddam-less Iraq.

Colin Powell now apparently understands this logic in the case of Afghanistan. Let's hope he gets it soon when it comes to Iraq.