Fighting the wrong war

Afghans have paid a high price for a campaign that has failed to meet its original aims

The toppling of the Taliban may eventually prove to be the best thing to have happened in Afghanistan for a decade. But it was not an initial aim of the US-led war. In the wake of their departure from Kandahar, that point cannot be stressed enough, before the drumbeat of triumpalism deafens us all. Victory over the wrong opponent is not much of a victory. It sounds more like "collateral benefit" - provided we are sure the benefit outweighs the costs.

Remember the war's stated purpose: to bring to justice those who had helped to mastermind the atrocities of September 11, and eliminate the bases where the terrorists had learned their skills. All the information available (and it was known before the first missile was launched against Afghanistan) suggests that the 19 hijackers trained for their mission in Europe and the United States, and entered the US with legal visas. Evidence that they personally had any connection with Afghanistanhas been minimal, verging on nil. No suggestion has ever been made that any of the al-Qaida network were Afghans.

That Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida, had lived in Afghanistan for over five years was well known. That he had inspired the concept of a high-profile attack on US targets of symbolic national significance - without necessarily choosing the methods, the timing or the men - was a reasonable suspicion. But where does that put the Taliban? There has been much indignant talk about "people who harbour terrorists". Unload the emotion, and this is not much more useful than describing European states which decline to deport murder suspects to the US as "people who harbour killers".

More importantly, the Taliban had no way of enforcing their will on Bin Laden. If Donald Rumsfeld, with his infra-red laser-guided heat-seeking cave-buster bombs, cannot find Bin Laden after nine weeks on the job, how does he expect the Taliban to have done better? As Ahmed Rashid's excellent book on the Taliban makes abundantly clear, Mullah Mohammed Omar is no Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. He did not run a "war machine" or a "police state". Afghanistan was an impoverished and destroyed society with minimal infrastructure, in which the concept of governance meant nothing more than the use of a few satellite telephones to issue social edicts which the so-called religious police enforced. Almost every urban service, from education to health to food, was provided by outside aid agencies or privately by Afghans on their own. Villages had to fend for themselves.

To imagine that in such a vacuum of government the Taliban could arrest Bin Laden was laughable, although Mullah Omar did, of course, ask a shura of religious leaders to consider the problem and they did recommend Bin Laden leave Afghanistan and be tried before an Islamic court elsewhere. If toppling the Taliban arrived late as a war aim (Tony Blair only stated it unequivocally on October 30, three weeks into the bombing campaign), it seems to have emerged through desperation and cynicism. Realising thatfinding Bin Laden might prove impossible, the war leaders turned their sights on the Taliban instead. Politically, they were easy meat. Few in the western world, women or men, would grieve to see them go. Commie-bashing was never as simple as this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/dec/11/afghanistan.comment

 

Perputual War is the GOAL of the NeoCONs.....

Blue TEAMers are playing right into their hands, YET AGAIN!