The seven-week military campaign in Afghanistan has given the world a stark view of a new American doctrine to make war on the sources of terrorism in the world.
But with the defeat of the Taliban perhaps only days away and the hunt for Osama bin Laden intensifying, the force of the American destruction of Afghan targets has sent an unambiguous warning far beyond the war theater to a number of regimes that continue to provide bases and training to terrorist groups. The warning is: This could happen to you.
Yet how US President George W. Bush takes the war campaign from phase one in Afghanistan to phase two against al-Qaeda as well as other "global reach" terrorist groups located in dozens of other countries remains an unsettled and, in some quarters, an unsettling question.
Deep reservations exist among allies in Europe, the Middle East and Russia over the advocacy by some Bush administration officials who want to expand military operations to other countries, especially by taking the next phase of the war to Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein once and for all.
Although Bush has yet to speak to the American people about the next phase of the war, its risk and its burdens -- all of which are still under intense debate inside the administration -- the pulverizing effect of phase one in Afghanistan sends a clear message that the Bush administration has discarded the old military doctrines that applied so rigidly under his father.
At the time of the first Bush presidency, General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prevailed with the Powell Doctrine that "overwhelming force" needed to be massed to defeat an entrenched Iraqi enemy in Kuwait.
The doctrine insisted on clear objectives and a clear exit strategy. It now seems possible that such a strategy could have been employed in Afghanistan by massing forces within a coalition to break the Taliban's entrenched forces.
But the second Bush administration has modified that equation in favor of innovative tactics that quickly exploit enemy weaknesses with ruthless bombardment from the air under a doctrine in which the use of force is unrestrained by borders or allies.
Where Bush now takes this doctrine is an open question, but he has painted his mission broadly across the world.
In his Sept. 20 address to Congress, Bush explained it this way: "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." And he added that while "our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda -- it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
"One of the great tasks of wartime leadership is not only to communicate resolve and determination and will, but to explain what you are doing and why you are doing it," said Eliot Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University.
"I think thus far that is not quite what we have seen. We have seen a tremendous pulse of staunchness, but we have not seen the more intellectual side of war leadership, making the case for what we are doing and laying out the arguments for what we do next."
To Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, the US military has demonstrated, as it did during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the shattering effects of 225kg bombs dropped on troop concentrations. And once special forces spotters got on the ground, US commanders showed how a large arsenal of precision guided weapons could lay the Taliban forces naked to the Navy's carrier-based bombers.
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