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COMMENTARY
October 30, 2001
How it's going
The "war" part of the war against terrorism continues to go well from the U.S. and allied point of view. This week began Sunday as did the previous three with the addition of a new layer or dimension to the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. For the first time U.S. air forces engaged directly in support of field positions of the Afghan Northern Alliance both around Mazar-i-Sharif and north of Kabul. The effort to resupply them by air was also stepped up by an order of magnitude. This suggests expanded ground commitments are on the way; and I would not be surprised to see U.S. infantry in play supporting at least the forward supply effort in the coming fortnight or so. In a further very interesting development it seems American planes Sunday began to attack positions at Gora Tangi near the border with Pakistan. This mountain valley is known to be the site of an elaborate tunnel complex built by Osama bin Laden (he of the Saudi construction family) and used as a hideaway and weapons cache during the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation during the 1980s. My understanding is that it has been renovated and extended in the last five years and is the single most likely place to find senior Al Qaeda management. The proximity to Pakistan is no accident for until recently the terrorist network communicated with the outside world chiefly across the Pakistan frontier. A clever U.S. tactic would be to focus media and other attention as much as possible on the front lines by Kabul as little as possible on the special forces efforts at undisclosed locations around the country. All the more because attacks on a large densely guarded underground complex may require the use of weapons that world public opinion is not yet ready for. Deniability is worth preserving at some cost. But as I have argued before we are still essentially in the "reconnaissance" phase of an expanding war effort. Only seven weeks have passed since the attacks on New York and Washington and the Bush administration is still finding its way around. That it should be involved already in such forward positions within Afghanistan bespeaks an extraordinarily successful logistical effort. What makes it extraordinary is how it has been cobbled together. The U.S. began without advance preparation with military security and intelligence assets that had been run down throughout the Clinton administration (defence spending for example descending from almost six to less than three per cent of GDP). The Bush people are moreover operating in a corner of the world where U.S. diplomacy under Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright had made catastrophic mistakes alienating many previous and potential regional U.S. allies. This was especially the case with Pakistan where the U.S. cut back aid programmes in order to make tendentious points about Pakistan's human rights record and its nuclear weapons testing. Military connexions between the countries were allowed to lapse as the U.S. walked away from its commitment to help rebuild post-Soviet Afghanistan and reduced its humanitarian assistance to the refugees. When the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) bureaucracy began to openly patronize the Taliban faction in Afghanistan and then reciprocally to be infiltrated by Islamist fanatics the Clinton administration for the most part didn't know and didn't care. Suddenly it was awakened to what had been spawned by terrorist attacks on U.S. targets in Kenya Tanzania Saudi Arabia and Yemen and by an escalating terrorist crisis in Kashmir. Only then did it realize that crucial U.S. interests had been at stake all along. But the response to this discovery was to lob a few cruise missiles and again walk away. In supporting the Bush administration now the U.S. public needs to appreciate the degree of irresponsibility and the magnitude of the disaster from which it is recovering. Naturally the left condemns previous U.S. policy as if President Bush had been in power all these years. But he was hardly responsible for squandering the prestige the U.S. enjoyed in the aftermath of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan; nor for the bad odour which U.S. foreign policy had left throughout the Muslim world. The stench was worst in the places between Iran and India. It is necessary to make this point before proceeding to perceptions on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan now. Such indications as we have suggest there is actually a much higher level of support for the U.S. bombing within Afghanistan than we could ever have expected. Among the non-Pashtun ethnic groups that make up about two-thirds of the Afghan population there seems to be no trouble at all and it is quite unlikely that U.S. ground incursions would suffer the kind of popular resistance the Soviets experienced among these people. Among the remaining third of the population which is Pashtun and which unfortunately for the tactical effort will be encountered in villages spread through much of the country (in extreme west and north not just in its ancestral homeland corresponding to both sides of the Pakistan frontier) -- there are real worries. As I have written before these people consider themselves Pashtun before they consider themselves Afghan and while the majority of them are sick to death of the Taliban and outraged by the arrogance of the Arab "foreign legion" ruled by Osama bin Laden they do tend to consider an outside attack on any Pashtun for whatever reason to be an attack upon all Pashtuns. The limit of U.S. aspiration will be achieved if a large part of the Pashtun "nation" agrees to absent itself from the conflict thus isolating the Taliban "minority within a minority". To this end cash is the best incentive in this part of the world and the U.S. has only recently come to terms with the need to buy off Pashtun tribal leaders. And this less for the purpose of gaining their support for some future coalition under ex-king Zahir Shah (they will do this for their own reasons when and if such a regime emerges) than simply to stay out of the conflict for the time being. The loss last week of Abdul Haq one of the very few Pashtun tribal leaders who would have been presentable on Western television has been counted as a big U.S. setback. It is but not quite for the reason given. He was almost certainly on a private mission though with U.S. blessing to bribe a prominent fellow Pashtun chief at the time the Taliban captured and executed him. He was reported to be carrying wads of cash. The most likely cause of his interception and death was a tip-off to the Taliban from a rogue source within Pakistani intelligence (the ISI). What we learn from the experience is that it is nearly impossible for agents allied with the U.S. to make contact with the people who might be happy to accept bribes. This is what is so discouraging. It is an indication that the Taliban continue to enjoy not only "friends in high places" within the government of Pakistan but also a monopoly on communications within the part of Afghanistan they continue to control. This is not a setback however only a failure to make progress. Neither are the civilian casualties caused by misplaced U.S. bombs a setback in the cause of "winning their hearts and minds". Collateral damage has been a feature of everyday Afghan life for the last 27 years and it is taken for granted by all parties to the conflict. It would only become a setback if Afghan civilians came to believe that they were actually meant to be targets. But the fact that a large proportion of the urban population of Kabul has stayed in place is a proof that few actually believe this. (The case is somewhat different in Kandahar where repeated U.S. targeting of Taliban residences and social institutions has triggered a more general evacuation towards Quetta in Pakistan.) The "big issue" of civilian casualties is made for the Western and international Islamic audiences only; and indeed papers like Canada's Globe and Mail can be counted upon to give elaborate and almost loving attention to each incident the Taliban seeks to parade. For one of the few things the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies think they know about Western public opinion is that we have no stomach for civilian casualties whether on their side or our own. Yet according to polls and despite media song and dance 85 per cent of the U.S. public are not currently put off by civilian casualties and accept that they are as inevitable as they are unintended. A further mistake is made by assuming that the U.S. is at the limit of its resources; for the amount of ordnance that has been dropped so far on Afghan targets has only just passed the amount dropped on Iraq in the first night of the 1991 air campaign. The parallel belief that the U.S. is unwilling to risk ground troops and the casualties they will take is another surprise in waiting. For again despite media ninnying the polls show the U.S. public are ready for that. On balance the war is not going badly. But it is still in its initial stage still essentially a reconnaissance operation. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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