For starters, that means moving far beyond Osama bin Laden. The likely perpetrators of these murderous attacks are the product of a fringe network of militants originally recruited by the CIA and Pakistan from around the Arab and Muslim world in the 1980s during the Soviet war with Afghanistan. After pulling its support once the Soviet Union left, the US further angered these militants during the Gulf War when it stationed troops and bases in the Arabian Peninsula near the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Consequently, anti-US bombings began increasing from the 1995 and 1996 car-bombings at US military installations in Saudi Arabia, to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the recent attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.

Osama bin Laden is not the sole mastermind of these attacks as is often claimed in the media. He just facilitates these groups with logistics and finances. His network has no geographical location or fixed center. It appears to be a kaleidoscopic overlay of cells and links that span the globe from camps on the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to immigrant ghettoes in Europe and the U.S.

What's more, this network is largely disconnected from most Islamic opposition groups in the Middle East who are fighting national struggles to create Islamic states. What drives their hatred of the US is not Islam but more political factors. They believe that Muslims have received the brunt of international violence over the last decade. They point to the genocide against Bosnian Muslims, the Russian war in Chechnya, the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and the UN sanctions against Iraq. In all of these cases, they view US policies either tacitly condoning the violence or actively supporting it.

Therefore, a military strike on militant camps in Afghanistan may kill or capture bin Laden and a number of his associates but it will not likely incapacitate the far-flung networks of militants that may have produced the recent attacks. They will remain in place, with new reasons to carry out more terror. Moreover, a massive display of American military might brought to bear on a Muslim nation, especially one that kills innocent civilians in the process, is precisely the type of action that these militants hope will create the conditions for unifying greater numbers of Muslims against the United States. It would confirm their view that the US is an arrogant superpower that cares little about Muslim lives.

A more effective alternative to a military response must combine a massive international law enforcement effort with a political strategy designed to isolate and undermine these militant networks. The deliberate and murderous attacks on innocent American civilians should be characterized and prosecuted as a crime not a war. The United States must use all its resources to compel international cooperation to ensure that the perpetrators have no place to hide. Identifying bin Laden and his network as criminals who have violated international law will make it extremely difficult for countries, especially those who fear being allied with an American-led war, to refuse more discrete and effective assistance to the US. Also, given the disperse nature of the networks, only international cooperation will work to root them out. American declarations of war inhibit rather than promote this cooperation.

This approach must be bolstered by a political strategy that deepens the isolation of these fringe networks from the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, many of whom hold deep and legitimate grievances with US policies but who do not support violence. In words and deeds, the US must clearly make a distinction between Islam as a religion and violent extremism. But the US must also critically reexamine its policies in the Middle East.

The US should condemn the serious human rights abuses committed by its allies with the same force as it condemns other regimes in the region and condition its aid on progress in opening up closed political systems. It should curtail the massive arms transfers to the region and reduce its military presence, which have done little to promote democracy or stability. The US must also recognize the failure of the devastating sanctions regime on Iraq and support legitimate Palestinian aspirations for an independent state alongside a secure Israel.

Such an approach is not a concession to terrorism but a more realistic and effective response that is closer to the values that the United States claims to uphold.

Steve Niva teaches International Politics and Middle East Studies at the Evergreen State College. He writes regularly for Middle East Report (www.merip.org) and is an Associate at the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) in Washington DC.

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