The attack on the US is prompting some hard thinking about the role of defence forces, including those of New Zealand, as GREG ANSLEY reports.
At Britain's Joint Services Staff and Command College this week, David Dickens was told that New Zealand would be a welcome member of any military coalition formed to avenge the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Dickens, the director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Wellington, accepted this as an expression of the respect in which New Zealand's forces, tiny as they may be, are held. But, perhaps more than most, New Zealand has been rummaging through its closet to see just what it could bring, not only to this crisis, but to what now appears likely to be a long and arduous campaign such as no conventional military has waged before.
"New Zealand defence policy basically says the future of conflict is between groups within a state rather than between states," Dickens says. "What the World Trade Center attack was about was networks within states, sheltered by states, against states."
It is not only our dilemma. Nobody really understands yet what the new tools of war must be.
Tim Ripley, terrorism project leader at Britain's Centre for Defence and International Security Studies, says the calamity in New York is forcing world leaders to reassess what their defence forces are actually defending against. "They've got to decide what is the overall security objective," he says. "They have to go back to the basics as to how they actually conduct their defence planning.
"In the old days everybody said 'we've got to have an air force, we have to have a navy, we have to have an army'. You started from there, whereas in this sort of scenario the enemy doesn't have an army, doesn't have a navy, doesn't have an air force, it doesn't have a country for you to attack, and it doesn't have a base."
Suddenly, says University of Queensland analyst Leah Farrell, terrorism has gone from a small military and largely criminal problem to the biggest threat facing the world. It is such a threat because the kamikaze bombings of New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC have dramatically demonstrated the relative ease with which a small international organisation can wreak devastation on a vast scale.
"For all of us who thought we were invulnerable," Dickens says," the fundamental lesson is that it doesn't matter where you are on the globe. Now every aeroplane is a potential cruise missile and every train or petrol tanker or ship is a potential torpedo."
The reach of Osama bin Laden, the renegade Saudi millionaire-cum-terrorist targeted by the US for the World Trade Center attack, is as long and lethal as it is ethereal.
Australian terrorism expert Dr Rod Lyon says bin Laden's organisation is the opposite of such earlier terrorist groups as the Japanese Red Army, developing instead as an amorphous hybrid strung together with almost invisible laces in which largely autonomous cells work independently. Bin Laden has struck terror into this region despite condemnation from both political and spiritual leaders of Asian countries with large Muslim populations: even the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines has rejected his calls for a holy war against the West. But bin Laden's tentacles still reach into the troubled Philippines through the Abu Sayyaf Group, and into Malaysia via that nation's policy of an open border to Muslims and such homegrown extremists as Kumpulan Militan Malaysia.
Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic state, faces growing problems from separatism, the erosion of rigid Suharto-era internal security, dissent within a military that at its extremes harbours sympathies for Islamic fundamentalism, and groups such as Laskar Jihad (Holy War Taskforce).
The region has no cohesive answer. Its only real institution is the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), which is embroiled in its own economic and territorial problems, lacks any sort of anti-terrorism framework and has no common defence organisation.
The response has been to raise a mighty coalition army, invoking both self-interest and - for the first time - clauses of the Anzus and Europe's Nato treaties defining an attack on one member as an attack on all. But how do you use aircraft carriers to swat ghosts?
America's Project on Defence Alternatives says present military capability is totally unsuited for a war against terrorism, designed instead to defend against other armies.
When terrorists and their mentor states are targeted, warns Dr Jonathan Tucker, of the US Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, Western technology will be countered with its own limitations. In the Gulf War Iraq used aluminium foil and heat generators to defeat radar and infra-red sensors; decoy missiles to protect Scuds; crude mines to defeat state-of-the-art US warships; coaxial and fibre-optic cables to prevent eavesdropping; and even smoke from burning oil wells to blind laser-guided weapons.
The key for the West, analysts say, is intelligence. This was the huge failure that allowed the World Trade Center to be destroyed. Despite earlier attacks and more recent warnings, specific targeting of bin Laden and the dozens of people involved in the World Trade Center attack, America's $US10 billion-a-year counter-terrorism effort did not uncover the plot.
Even in supposedly ruthlessly efficient Japan, intelligence agencies relied on US-sourced information and failed to discover that while they were watching American facilities, bin Laden's operatives were making a killing on the stockmarket to finance their campaigns.
Australian sources say this will mean rethinking in our intelligence communities, placing new emphasis on information gathering and sharing through such arrangements as the UKUSA network linking New Zealand and Australia with the US and Britain, and on electronic eavesdropping facilities such as the Waihopai installation near Blenheim.
"What the World Trade Center has done is to highlight the importance of the kind of work the Secret Intelligence Service [SIS] and the Government Communications Security Bureau [GCSB] do in monitoring communications, and in having people on the ground to monitor what ... people engaged in terrorism might be doing," Dickens says.
Former defence chief Sir Somerford Teagle believes a cultural change is also needed. "New Zealand must ensure that its intelligence service is not only properly resourced but is accepted as a reality that in this world we have to have," he says. "We have to accept the unpleasant reality that not everybody wants to live in peace."
Associated with this has been a rapid acceptance by governments - despite the potential dangers to human rights - that immigration and refugee flows are now issues of national security requiring some form of military response.
Australia has already deployed a significant part of its navy and air force to intercept boats bringing asylum-seekers from Indonesia, and is considering proposals to create a new coastguard to release warships for military duties.
New Zealand, although largely for protection of economic resources, plans to keep only two warships and to build a new fleet of large but lightly armed patrol vessels.
The problem, analysts say, is that the carnage of New York has not diminished the need for conventional military forces, but added new demands on them. Dickens says that, while limited, existing New Zealand forces such as the SAS, regular infantry, C130 Hercules aircraft and Anzac frigates could play useful roles in any operations mounted by a US-led anti-terrorist coalition.
Dr Rod Smith, director of defence and strategic studies at the University of Waikato, says it is always a mistake to try to deal with the last security crisis rather than the next, and that the presumption of a benign region that underlay present defence policy needs to be reassessed.
Like most of his colleagues, Smith believes the US will be extremely careful to build a coalition that embraces widespread Islamic support and to avoid retaliation that would inflame international passions.
"But there is the possibility that, if not this event, some other event will not be controllable and you have a more general conflict which pits the West against the Islamic world," he says. "In the event of anything going anywhere near that direction, our defences are completely inappropriate."
Teagle says New Zealand needs to do some soul-searching in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing. "I think to go out saying that you should double the size of the military tomorrow is nonsensical," he says. "That's not what were talking about. But perhaps [New Zealand defence policy] requires a rethink."
In Britain, Ripley also warns against knee-jerk reactions. He says the technique of ramming hijacked jets into skyscrapers may be new but terrorism is not, and while military planning may need to be reassessed, broader strategic realities remain.
"It doesn't strike me as a fundamentally new phenomenon which requires Australia or South-east Asian countries to rejig their security strategies."
Map: Opposing forces in the war against terror
For coverage of the attacks on the United States, see: