What Happened in 2002

In 2002, the United States continued to consolidate its military victory in Afghanistan, mounting two major offensives in eastern Afghanistan along the Pakistani border to prevent remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda from re-establishing a territorial base there. The military cooperation with the Northern Alliance opposition coalition paid major dividends on the battlefield, but many leaders of the Taliban and al-Qaeda were able to escape and remain in hiding.

Washington brokered the formation of an interim Afghan government, headed by Hamid Karzai, which has pledged to hunt down the remaining Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, but that government has little power outside the capital of Kabul. The United States worked to strengthen and broaden the Karzai government, to train and build up the fledgling Afghan army, and to provide food and humanitarian supplies for over 1 million Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan. However, the security situation in the Afghan countryside remains tenuous because of continuing clashes between rival warlords and persistent terrorist attacks by Taliban diehards.

The United States also expanded the war against al-Qaeda outside of Afghanistan. It dispatched military advisers and trainers to the Philippines, Yemen, and Georgia to assist local governments threatened by al-Qaeda operations. The U.S. Navy searched ships leaving Pakistan and established a screening force off the coast of Somalia to interdict al-Qaeda personnel fleeing from Afghanistan through Pakistan. Approximately 1,200 troops and an unknown number of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary forces were dispatched to Djibouti to form a quick reaction force for possible future military operations in the Horn of Africa or Yemen.

On November 3, U.S. forces attacked al-Qaeda for the first time outside Afghanistan, when the CIA used an unmanned Predator aircraft armed with a Hellfire missile to destroy a car carrying a senior al-Qaeda leader and five associates in Yemen.

What to Do in 2003

The United States must relentlessly attack the al-Qaeda network on as many fronts as possible. To this end, it should:

• Cooperate with a broad coalition of states and sub-state groups to gather intelligence on, infiltrate, and dismantle bin Laden's network. This will include cutting off the flow of money to its coffers, promoting factional squabbling among its members, and keeping it on the run.
• Press Saudi Arabia to step up its cooperation in the war against al-Qaeda. The Saudis have dragged their feet on efforts to disrupt the flow of funds to bin Laden's network. Congress and the Administration should pressure Riyadh to investigate and interdict any of bin Laden's fundraising efforts. In particular, the Saudi government needs to closely monitor and regulate the activities of some Islamic charities that reportedly have diverted funds to bin Laden.1
• Maintain maximum pressure on the state sponsors of terrorism. The United States should work with its allies to raise the diplomatic, economic, political, and potential military costs of sponsoring terrorism to such high levels that the costs to state sponsors outweigh the strategic benefits. In particular, Washington should press its allies to take a harder line against Iran, which remains the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Tehran has given extensive support to the Lebanon-based Hezballah terrorist group, as well as to Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad, which continue to target Israel with terrorist bombs.
• Maintain trade sanctions on Iran under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act and press European and Asian allies to follow suit. Washington also should seek to deny Iran loans and aid from international economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The goal should be to penalize Iran's hostile behavior, reduce its ability to finance terrorism, slow its military buildup, drive home the costs of supporting terrorism, and give pragmatic Iranian leaders maximum incentives to rein in the hardliners that continue to support terrorism.
• Lead an international effort that would replace rogue regimes in Iran and other states that continue to support terrorism. The United States should provide diplomatic, economic, and logistical support to movements opposed to those terrorist regimes. To prevent another September 11-type attack, the United States should actively seek the removal of regimes that serve as sanctuaries and patrons for terrorist groups with a global reach. It should not make the same mistake it made in the 1990s when it turned a blind eye to the hostile policies of the ultra-radical Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In the future, it would be preferable to support opposition movements to uproot terrorist regimes before, rather than after, they lend support to major terrorist attacks against the United States.

James Phillips is a Research Fellow in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

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