Fixing foreign policy: how the U.S. should wage the war on terror.

• Author: Carpenter, Ted Galen

FOR MORE THAN half a century, the U.S. military was an instrument of Washington's foreign policy in far-flung regions of the world. The idea of retaliating for an attack on American territory was barely on the radar screen.

Not so now. U.S. forces have fought Al Qaeda terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan and helped overthrow the Taliban government that made that country a haven for Osama bin Laden and his followers. Those actions were entirely appropriate, and the United States should take the next stage of the war into Pakistan, where most of the remaining Al Qaeda fighters have regrouped. But we must stay focused on the threat posed by bin Laden's network. In particular, we should not use terrorism as a pretext to settle old scores against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has made contradictory statements about the scope of the military's mission. At times, officials seem to focus on those responsible for the September 11 attacks. On other occasions, they suggest that America's goal is a war against terrorism per se--even terrorists who aren't targeting the United States. In his State of the Union address, President Bush went even further, singling out Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of evil" and implying that those countries' efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction were part of a global terrorist threat.

America badly needs to clarify its objectives. A war against Al Qaeda and any other organization or government that targets the United States is different from a general crusade against all organizations that use terrorist tactics against some adversary. The latter would be an extraordinarily broad and difficult mission. Yet even that mission would be narrower than a crusade against all terrorist organizations, plus all evil regimes that might possess weapons of mass destruction. A prime requirement of any good security strategy is that its objectives be realistic and attainable. Neither the second mission nor the third meets that test.

Equally troubling is Washington's failure to adjust its overall security strategy to meet the new threat posed by groups such as Al Qaeda. There has been no willingness to rethink old commitments and obligations. Instead, all the existing missions have been preserved and the new one simply added to the list.

That is a terribly myopic approach. At the end of the Cold War, the United States should have conducted a detailed audit of its security...