Digging In for the Long Haul

The prospect of war in the hills and valleys of Afghanistan is chilling. Throughout its history, the country has shown an impressive ability—sometimes heroic, sometimes dastardly—to make life miserable for those who cross its borders in anger. Will America be the next great power to be mauled there? Could the struggle against terrorism become a protracted and bloody mess like Vietnam, leaving a sour residue of defeat and bitterness?

True, victory can't be assured (nor easily defined). But to predict another Vietnam for America and its allies is unduly pessimistic. The war against terrorism might be more pertinently seen as a new cold war—because of several important parallels.

First, the cold war lasted a long time—more than 40 years. So will the war against terrorism. It will not end with the head of Osama bin Laden on a platter, but with the recognition from even the most embittered that this form of political statement is not worth the price. That could easily take decades, meaning that this effort must be sustained even as governments rise and fall.

Second, the cold war was global. Given the ease of moving money and people, the accessibility of communications and the diversified arms market, the battle against terrorism will make itself felt on every continent.

Third, cold war politics made for some strange bedfellows and unsavory alliances. The unintended consequences of gunshot weddings can be considerable: America's support, say, for various tin-pot despots in the name of anticommunism was not the stuff of greatness. But it is not possible to rule out working with the enemies of one's enemies, even if they are sometimes themselves illiberal and undemocratic. Already, for example, the U.S. Congress is reconsidering the policy that made it difficult for intelligence agencies to hire foreign agents with violent pasts. And it is not at all impossible that, say, Iran would want to come on board in some form for its own purposes.

Finally, and most important, the cold war was waged across a variety of fronts. Militarily, the era was marked by the nuclear weapons buildup and the maintenance of substantial standing armies by the major powers. They never went to armed battle against one another. Still, it was hardly a pacific era: wars in Indochina, civil strife in Indonesia, the missile crisis in Cuba, deadly conflicts in places like Grenada, Mozambique and Nicaragua—all were cold war battles.

But the cold war was not fought only with nukes, Kalashnikovs and proxies. It was waged through alliances such as asean and NATO, which raised the likely price of conflict and therefore deterred it. It was fought through the battle of ideas, through entities like Encounter magazine and Radio Free Europe. (In his autobiography, Markus Wolf, the former intelligence chief of East Germany, rated RFE as one of the West's most effective tools.) It was fought through economics: imposing higher costs of trade by limiting the Soviet Union's ability to sell natural gas, for example. It was fought through legislation, such as America's Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked Soviet-American trade to improved human rights, especially the emigration of Russian Jews. Diplomacy played a huge role. The Soviet Union routinely and brutally violated the provisions of the Helsinki treaty on human rights, for example. But looking back we realize that the fact that Moscow signed this treaty provided substantial leverage both for homegrown activists (like Anatoly Scharansky) and the outside world.

The analogy between the cold war and the current crisis can be stretched only so far. The cold war sort of seeped into existence as the Soviet Union evolved from a World War II ally of America to a rival and then an enemy. The war on terrorism, by contrast, can be dated to a single stunning moment. The cold war also had a focus in the shape of the Soviet Union. There is no such equivalent in the current struggle, no one place whose defeat—or transformation—would signal the beginning of a world safe from terrorism.

Finally, the cold war was waged against a system that was officially godless, and which based its moral authority (however cynically) on what it conceived as a scientific understanding of the march of history. This claim, of course, could not withstand genuine scrutiny. Tellingly, many of the Soviet Union's most prominent dissidents, such as Andrei Sakharov, were scientists. They saw that the claims of communism couldn't be empirically validated; moreover, they had the courage to say that the evidence proved the opposite of communism's claim to build peace, happiness or even a decent car.

The struggle against terrorism, by contrast, is to some extent directed against people and groups who claim to be driven by faith. Theirs may be a distorted religiosity, but it is a powerfully felt one nonetheless. The appeals to reason that helped make communism quite literally unbelievable simply do not apply. The worst case is if the U.S. and its allies end up in a messy Vietnam-type debacle on the ground and in a new kind of cold war. As prosecuted by the eventual winners, the cold war was ultimately driven by the belief that freedom was a value worth defending. This fight will require the same kind of commitment.

With reporting by Cait Murphy is a senior editor at Fortune magazine

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