America at War, 2010

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

Thomas Donnelly
October 18, 2010

Before there was 9/11, there was 10/12. A decade ago this week, al Qaeda operatives staged a spectacular suicide attack on the USS Cole while it was refueling in Aden, Yemen. The terrorists puttered up to the destroyer’s port side, waving at the U.S. sailors working on deck. Once aside the Cole, the two assailants shaped a 1,000-pound charge to the ship’s hull. On the other side of the hull was the galley, where many of the crew were lining up for lunch. The subsequent explosion killed 17 sailors, injured another 39, and ripped a 40-foot gash in the Cole. By any historical standard, the attack was an act of war. Its purpose was political, its logic was strategic, its operational design was bold, and its tactical execution was flawless.

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Ten years on, our confusion lingers. The Pentagon’s senior judge overseeing terrorist trials dropped all charges against the mastermind of the Cole attack, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. But the controversy over this decision largely misses the point: The wartime purpose of detaining terrorist operatives and capturing or killing their commanders is not to prosecute them—either by military commission or in federal court—but to defeat them. It matters less that a war criminal is brought to justice than that an enemy is removed from the battlefield or becomes a source of intelligence.

As our weariness with the “Long War”—the war not just against al Qaeda but to secure the long-term interests of the United States in the greater Middle East—grows, the temptation to return to a 10/12 mentality grows as well. In the prolonged debate over strategy for the war in Afghanistan, for example, President Obama made plain that what he most wanted was an approach that limited his commitment. It’s a short step from a “narrow counterterrorism” military strategy to a narrower counterterrorism law-enforcement strategy.

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