Clark: U.S. public, media must accept
that patience is crucial in war on terror
By Lisa Burgess,
Washington bureau
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Northern Alliance can defeat the Taliban without the help of
major U.S. ground forces as long as the rebels don’t cave in to U.S. pressure to
mount a premature major attack, according to retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark.
Clark is the former supreme allied commander-Europe and commanded the first major
combat operation in NATO history.
The Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban groups have been in dire straits for
years, without adequate supplies and good leadership, Clark said Thursday during a talk at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"It takes months and years to change the spirit of an army, and we want to do it
in 45 days," Clark said. "We can’t even transform our own military, and
we’ve been talking about it for 15 years."
The anti-Taliban forces will prevail, "as long as the Northern Alliance
doesn’t shatter itself in some premature action to satisfy American pressure" to
get a "big win" on the ground.
Patience was a major theme of Clark’s discussion about winning the war on
terrorism.
The American public and the media must curtail their impatience for a fast resolution
to the Afghanistan campaign, the former general said.
The public must also develop "a sense of purpose in foreign policy," a sense
that was lost after the Soviet Union collapsed, Clark said. "We lost our military
strategy."
As the principal military architect of the Kosovo campaign, Clark said that the U.S.
effort in Afghanistan is not as different as senior leadership would have the public
believe.
Like Kosovo, the war on terrorism "is a modern war," Clark said.
"It starts with some degree of surprise — you can’t pull off a shelf
plans for a major regional contingency. It’s a throw-together, and you have to plan
while you do it. It’s easiest to use air power. You have to be concerned about
civilian casualties. You have to have coalitions. And the press is everywhere."
Although the media is increasingly "all over the battlefield," military
commanders should not regard press presence and interest in campaigns as an obstacle to
their efforts, Clark said.
"The press is not a hindrance; it’s a condition, like sunshine or fog or
snow," Clark said. "You have to work with it."
Clark had some words of advice for military officers on how to handle the press: Learn
how the media works and use it.
"The press is one of the great weapons of modern warfare," Clark said.
"If it’s used correctly, you can achieve decisive results without having to
achieve decisive military victory."
Pentagon officials have emphasized the U.S. military’s psychological warfare
operations in Afghanistan, which include airdropping leaflets with anti-Taliban pictures
and slogans and "Commando Solo" flights that broadcast radio programs with
pro-U.S. messages.
But based on his experience in Serbia, the U.S. military’s psychological
operations are not likely to have much of an effect on the Afghanistan effort, Clark said.
"Everybody is looking for some secret gimmick," Clark said. "In Kosovo,
I don’t think information warfare made much difference, and psychological operations
are one step less sophisticated than information warfare."
The psychological operations campaign in Afghanistan is further hampered by widespread
illiteracy and the fact that very few people in that country can afford radios, even fewer
own television sets, and both devices are banned by the Taliban.
Yet even if attempts to sway Afghans aren’t successful, winning the information
war outside Afghanistan will be critical to U.S. success in the Enduring Freedom campaign,
Clark said.
"We’re being clubbed to death on collateral damage in the Islamic world, even
if much of [that news] is being made up," Clark said.
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