Where to stand

If there's one thing to remember in the War on Terrorism, it's this: Our ground war in Afghanistan is only a short-term solution to terrorism, at best. The doves think it's no solution at all, and the hawks think it's the ultimate solution — they're both wrong.

The Princeton Peace Network recently protested at Princeton, chanting, "Not our war." Well, I've got bad news: This struggle is ours whether we like it or not. Military action may be counterproductive to our efforts by uniting against the United States people who would have supported us had we won their support first. And military action may be ineffective at rooting out terrorism. But military action is a necessary part of the solution. Terrorist camps must be destroyed. The Taliban government that supports al Qaida must be destroyed. Osama bin Laden must be killed. Period. That's why the doves are wrong.

In fighting the military war on terrorism, however, we must not become overconfident in our military strength and exhibit the sort of hubris we've shown recently by planning a post-Taliban government long before the Taliban's defeat is anywhere in sight.

But the hawks too miss one important fact: We can destroy all the terrorists in the world and not destroy terrorism. Terrorism is a state of mind and until people don't have a reason to commit terrorism, terrorism will continue.

This is not a justification for terrorism — I don't fall into the crowd that blames America for Sept. 11. But terrorism is not irrational. There are reasons for terrorism — however misguided they are. And failing to address those reasons directly will delay an ultimate victory over terrorism.

The majority of people in the Middle East are under 25 years old, uneducated, poor and angry. Angry for lots of reasons — because their governments have oppressed them for decades (governments the United States has often supported), because they've lost out in the globalization game (while the United States has won), because they're humiliated by Israel (a state the United States supports against "ethnic" Arab Palestinians). But anti-American Arab nationalism was there before bin Laden, and it will be there after he's gone.

The ultimate goal of the struggle against terrorism must not be winning a war — it must be changing an attitude. And that is something that cannot be done with an army — it can only be done through generations of work to give Arab youth other ways to exercise power than blowing up themselves.

Bin Laden appeals to Arab youth and is using their anger for his own purposes — perhaps to oust the Saudi government, perhaps to create a powerful bloc of anti-American regimes, perhaps for other reasons. As a recent newsmaker put it: "It's hard to lose a public relations war to a mass murderer, but that's exactly what the U.S. is doing."

Whatever the solution to terrorism, it involves redistributing political and economic power in the Mideast.

Now is not the right time for this. But now is also not the right time to make Arab youth our enemy. We must show them that prosperity and modernity are attainable for the Islamic world and are not opposed to the Islamic way of life. The biggest problem the United States faces, however, is not convincing Arab youth that all this is true. The biggest problem we face is convincing them why they should care. Adam Frankel is a Wilson School major from New York. He can be reached at afrankel@princeton.edu.