London The Guardian (in English) p. 16 — [Martin Walker article: “Mission Impossible”]

It was planned as a short, sharp and brilliant action, a commando raid by the elite US Delta Force to capture the Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed. As the dust from the stun grenades settled yesterday, it had netted one empty building, the staff of the United Nations Development Project and the French aid workers of Action Against Hunger.

Whoops. Delta Force does it again. The people who brought the world Operation Desert Disaster in the wilds of Iran, colliding their helicopters in the botched rescue attempts of the American hostage diplomats in Tehran, have chalked up another humiliation.

It was never like this for Rambo, for Hollywood’s seductive myth that all you need are heroes with stout hearts and smart weapons. But the delusion that military power can be used with the precision of a scalpel to achieve complex policy goals endures.

They should have learned by now. The smart bombs that devastated Iraq’s C-3-Command, Control and Communications systems–in the Gulf war have neither toppled Saddam Husayn nor stabilized the Gulf. America’s best friend in the region, is technically close to bankrupt, and America’s real worry, Iran, is increasingly the dominant force in the region.

Th: US Marines who were deployed as peacekeepers in Beirut by President Reagan kept no peace, and were devastated by a low-tech terrorist with a truck filled with explosives. The Marines were withdrawn. Beirut sank into an anarchic nightmare which has only been eased by the subtle extension of Syrian authority over Lebanon–one of the outcomes the Marines were deployed to prevent.

The brisk little invasion of Panama by President Bush finally captured General Manuel Noriega but neither stabilized Panama nor much interrupted the country’s role in the flow of cocaine to America’s inner cities.

The faith in military action is not purely an American delusion. The Soviet Union was convinced that its policy goals in Afghanistan could be achieved through its own version of Delta Force. On December 27, 1979, the pride of Soviet special forces, Alpha team and the Zee group, stormed into the palace of Hafizollah Amin, shot him and installed a government led by Babrak Kamal. The consequent war, with its strains on Moscow’s international relations, on its army, and on its social fabric as the Afghan veterans came home dead, disabled, or addicted to drugs and violence, made the Afghan operation a self-inflicted wound.

Today’s Central Intelligence Agency is proud of its own long, secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Its support and arming of the Mujahidin, its close liaison with Pakistani intelligence and the lavish donation of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles all helped inflict a humili-ating defeat on the Soviet foe. But now the CIA is trying to buy back the Stingers that got away, some of them to Iran. The CIA has just certified that its old chums in Pakistan have been de-stabilising the region by buying Chinese M-11 ballistic missiles. And Afghanistan remains locked in tribal wars. And the Russians are back in Afghanistan. Russian troops, acting under the very vague authority of the Commonwealth of Independent States, have this month been shelling and sending cross-border units into Afghanistan again, this time to harry the Muslim fundamentalist rebels against the pro-Moscow regime in Tajikistan.

Even when it works, military power is a blunt instrument. Those two new phrases which have entered the language, friendly fire and collateral damage, emphasise its imprecision. In the political sphere, the one guarantee in the use of the military is that it will be attended by the law of unintended consequences, that even soldierly precision will bring a different kind of muddle.

But the delusion endures, in part because of the peculiar force of the British example. On two occasions which caught the world’s imagination, Britain’s professional warriors appeared to bely the glum hunch of the cynical that whenever the soldiers solved one question, they left another and more complex one in their wake. The televised success of Britain’s SAS storming the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 created a new mythology of secret heroes, a delusion that governments could have a perfectly-honed precision tool for instant solutions. The success of Britain’s Falklands campaign reinforced the delusions that with the right weapons and the right troops, the will of politicians could be quickly and efficiently done.

The British example proved beguiling for its most powerful ally. What Britain could achieve, for policy and popularity, in the Falklands was what President Reagan sought in his invasion of Grenada in the following year. Power worked, it felt good and it did wonders for the opinion poll ratings. The darker side of the SAS, its long and not notably successful campaign in Northern Ire land, blurred this comforting picture and was consequently ignored.

This is unfortunate, because Northern Ireland is a rather more useful model of the inherent difficulties of adapting military means to political problems. The politicians have locked themselves into a policy trap. For well-rehearsed reasons they will neither countenance British withdrawal, nor talk with the IRA. There is, in effect, no policy for the soldiers to apply, save keeping a loose lid on the violence and taking their casualties.

This illustrates the intrinsic gap between the military and political minds which has become one of the facts of Washington life. The military thinks in terms of tasks, of the force that must be applied to fulfil a mission. The military concept of time is closed; after so long, the job will be done. The politician thinks less of missions than of policies, and his sense of time is open. After the soldiers depart, the politician’s unending task remains.

Ever since Vietnam, the military men in the Pentagon have tried to discipline the politicians by applying an increasingly codified rule that is now known as Powell’s law, after the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Colin Powell. Before the military be deployed, Powell insisted, they should have a clear mission, the support of the US public and Congress, and a clear and foreseeable way out of the operation. Powell’s rule governed George Bush’s military operations in Panama, the Gulf and Somalia.

But Powell is now about to retire, while the Somalia operation continues with no clear exit for the reinforced US troops. And the US is now poised to deploy 20,000 troops, including its First Armored Division based in Germany, to enforce a very open-ended Bosnian peace agreement which may or may not be emerging from the Geneva talks.

The Clinton administration, with very little military experience, and the new Pentagon chief, General John Shalihashvili, who seems less devoted to Powell’s law than his elders who learnt in Vietnam about the vanity of military wishes, are now embarked on their learning curve.

If they are lucky, the lesson of Delta Force’s botched mission in Mogadishu will teach them something of the limits and liabilities of military power.

_{FBIS-WEU-93-170-A, 3 Sept. 1993, pp. 5-6}