Bradford Plumer, who is usually right, is surely wrong about this:
Initially, of course, the Bush administration tried to negotiate with the Taliban and get them to turn over bin Laden, Zawihiri, Abu Zubaydah, and the rest. That didn't work, but if it had worked, and bin Laden had been handed over on a silver platter, there may not have been an invasion at all—judging by Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, Rumsfeld wasn't all that excited about attacking Afghanistan in the first place—and instead the U.S. would've been sitting around handing out indictments and prosecuting terrorists. True, there still would've been some military action: the U.S. would have almost certainly bombed more al-Qaeda camps in the region, and the Taliban likely would've collapsed eventually after alienating all those Islamic militants it had been counting on to fight the Northern Alliance. But the whole thing might've been much less than the full-scale war we actually got.Not likely, in my opinion. For one thing, it was clear early on, and it became much clearer later, that the Taliban had fairly extensive ties with A.Q. and had benefited in the past from that cooperation. If the Taliban regime had simply coughed up bin Laden and Bush had pronounced himself satisfied, I think Bush would have been pilloried by his own side as deplorably weak.* What, his hawks would ask, happened to deterrence? And what, in the future, happens to regimes who get very cosy with terrorist groups? Can they wipe the slate clean in the future by simply coughing up a few bad guys, after years of helping them? No. This is the sort of thing that calls for a demonstration war, or no one would ever have let Bush dress up in a flight suit.
And indeed, as I remember it, it was fairly easy to tell at the time that the Bush administration wasn't keen to see the Taliban cave in to the demand to hand over bin Laden. The demand was made bluntly, with a very short deadline, and then not followed up with much in the way of serious diplomacy. And I'm willing to bet that if the Taliban had served up the whole A.Q. crew on a platter, more demands would have followed. The Bush administration wanted war.**
* True, Pakistan also had ties to A.Q., but the ties were easier to renounce and ignore, and Pakistan, a much larger nuclear power, would have been impossible to invade anyway.
** Not that war was unjustified. That's a separate question.
How do you figure the war was justified? I was cheerfully agreeing with everything you wrote til I came to the footnote. I would've thought that a failure to negotiate in good faith would preclude justification. Moreover, if you are talking about legal justification, you'd need to show a lot more than just that OBL was holed up in Afghanistan and that the Taliban was reluctant to hand him over.
Posted by: peter at June 28, 2005 10:22 AMI meant that the question of justification is distinct from the question I wanted to discuss, though obviously failure to negotiate in good faith would be relevant.
As for whether it was justified, I think a good case could be made that it was, or at least could have been, justified. But that is another, and much longer, story. (On which, I think this is a very useful contribution: Richard W. Miller, "Terrorism, War and Empire" in James Sterba, TERRORISM AND INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 186-205.)
Posted by: Chris at June 28, 2005 01:31 PMi seem to remember an afghan refugee, who was thought to have a lot of clout with the taliban leadership, go into afghanistan to lobby mulluh omar to give up bin laden. at the time he went, i seem to recall a brief glimmer of hope that the matter could be resolved peacefully. but the taliban killed him and that was that.
if his attempt succeeded, i think it is possible that the bombing and invasion of afghanistan may not have happened. instead, we might have fast-forwarded straight to iraq
Posted by: upyernoz at June 28, 2005 04:48 PM