Assessing Iraq's impact on broader terror war

Has the war to overthrow Saddam Hussain distracted the United States from more pressing matters, most notably the global war against Al Qaida?

Many top Democrats are arguing that case these days. Given that we are in a political season, people's opinions on this question tend to follow their partisan views. Rather than simply offering a yes/no answer, it seems more useful to construct a framework for evaluating this complicated question in an analytical way.

US military combat forces: After the Cold War ended, both the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration re-designed American defence forces to handle two regional wars at once.

Countries led by the likes of Saddam and Kim Jong-il in North Korea became our main worries. And even though the Bush administration failed to plan for difficult post-war operations in Iraq, military leaders in the 1990s were much more prescient, designing forces that could not only win wars but secure the peace thereafter.

Of course, virtually no one anticipated war in Afghanistan before 9/11. But the war there has been a much smaller operation than, for example, war in Korea would be. Hence, prevailing US defence strategy suggests that the US should have been able to handle two wars at once.

The US has used about half of the army and about one-third of the marine corps at any one time in the Iraq war, along with a roughly comparable fraction of the air force during actual combat operations (and a smaller but still considerable part of the navy). Up to 300,000 US forces have been in the Arabian Gulf at a time.

Meanwhile, the US never had more than about 25,000 forces in Afghanistan and surrounding countries and waters. It is hardly beyond the capacity of a total US military of 1.4 million active troops and nearly one million reservists to conduct these two operations in an overlapping fashion.

Re-fuelling aircraft, precision munitions and other specialised assets: Even though main combat forces have been ample for both wars, there have been more serious strains on certain specialised assets.

For example, re-fuelling aircraft and related assets such as transport aircraft were used in disproportionately large numbers in Afghanistan given its remoteness. This demand on re-fuelling planes was by far at its heaviest in the fall of 2001 and winter of 2002 - well before the US went to war against Iraq. By the time we prepared the invasion to overthrow Saddam, most such assets had had time to return home and receive thorough maintenance.

Precision ordinance

Similarly, heavy use of precision ordinance such as satellite-guided JDAM munitions in Afghanistan largely depleted stockpiles of these relatively new munitions for a time. But again, we had the ability to replenish inventories before fighting Saddam. I know of no instance in which we could not use a precision munition on an Al Qaida target due to competing demands from the war against Saddam.

Special forces and intelligence assets: This is a more complicated issue. The US has had to divert some special forces and intelligence assets - such as spy satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and linguists and analysts capable of deciphering what Al Qaida operatives are saying to one another - from Afghanistan to fight in Iraq. And it is possible the harm here is greater than the public record reveals, given the classified nature of these assets.

But the US still has 9,000 crack troops in Afghanistan, plenty for individual or even multiple simultaneous raids like those that have been conducted in recent months. Again, I know of no instances where insuffiicent numbers of available troops prevented the US from acting quickly on good intelligence about the location of Al Qaida operatives.

The real limits on American effectiveness against Al Qaida are two-fold. One, the US doesn't know where most Al Qaida members are located most of the time. Two, many are surely in Pakistan, beyond the reach of the US military in any event.

American law-enforcement officers have been working with Pakistanis, and have captured a couple of key Al Qaida leaders in Pakistan in the past 18 months. But the effectiveness of their efforts is mostly independent of the size of US military forces in Afghanistan.

Finally, there is little evidence that any ally has reduced its intelligence-sharing or law-enforcement activities with the US out of pique over Iraq policy. That anger has affected numerous aspects of allied relationships, to be sure - but not, as best we can tell, co-operation in the war on terror.

Important points

All that said, there are two important points where Democratic critics are surely right. First, because of the strain on America's main combat forces due primarily to post-Saddam operations in Iraq, the US has not deployed a large enough force to stabilise Afghanistan.

Warlords still rule the countryside; the economy remains weak; security is poor; drug production is again rampant. Bush's visceral aversion to nation building and his heavy use of American combat forces in Iraq, have largely prevented him from making good on his pledge in 2001 to the Afghan people to leave them with a much more stable and free country after the US-led war to defeat the Taliban.

Many Muslims around the world, already cynical about the US, see this reality as further proof of American indifference to their well-being. That reaction breeds anger, which can breed more terrorists.

Second, the mission in Iraq, which promises to last for years, risks breaking the US military. Combined with operations in Afghanistan and the Balkans, and vigilance in Korea, the US is severely straining its combat forces. That will potentially make military service of far less appeal to those men and women in active and reserve units who are needed for an all-volunteer armed forces.

US Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is therefore wrong to oppose the bipartisan congressional push to temporarily add several tens of thousands of troops to the US military force structure.

The strain on the military has not yet weakened the fight against terror, but it could weaken the national security quite dramatically in the future if it puts at risk the magnificent quality of today's professional armed forces.

On balance, the war in Iraq has not slowed the immediate war on Al Qaida. But it may have complicated it at times here and there. More critically, it has impeded the important task of re-building Afghanistan and ensuring it will not become a caldron where terrorism forms. It also risks weakening America's essential military.

O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.