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COMMENTARY
November 14, 2001
Kabul & beyond
"Long live America!" This is what -- contrary to predictions from U.S. critics and Arab friends -- they were shouting on the streets of Kabul yesterday: "Long live America!" It happened in Kuwait a decade ago and it can happen again. The trick is to liberate an imprisoned people. That there is looting and murder in Kabul as in Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat goes without saying. But it should be seen in its context. The looting is of abandoned Taliban weapons and other property and of food stores the Taliban had themselves appropriated from foreign aid sources. The murders are of Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers and operatives who got left behind -- especially the detested Pakistani "volunteers". This was bound to happen. And technically the ripping down of the Taliban's public scaffolds in the stadium at Kartayi Wali is an act of vandalism. But who cares? There has been no falling out between Northern Alliance troops with their various loyalties and ethnicities; that will take time. Nor is there any immediate danger that these conquering troops will turn upon Kabul's beleaguered civilians including the Pashtuns who make up the majority in the city. For the moment they are on their best behaviour because they are very happy. Rather than telling them pointlessly to stay out of Kabul and mind their manners the allies should instead be giving them marching orders to the south. The more tactful message to them would be: "More Taliban to kill! Follow our planes to Kandahar." Instead the Alliance troops have paused to celebrate with the townfolk for the moment after five years of Taliban misrule (preceded to be fair by Alliance misrule). The Kabuli women are ripping off their burqas the men are shaving off their beards and the children are flying kites. Music is playing on tape recorders and on the city radio for the first time since the Taliban took it over. Half of the city is in rubble (little of this caused by the U.S. bombing most of which was pinpoint; most of it cumulative from the last 27 years). But its people are enjoying the ecstacy of deliverance; while the U.N. committee of "six-plus-two" (all six of Afghanistan's immediate neighbours plus the U.S. and Russia) race to assemble a provisional government that will be reasonably acceptable to the local factions and encourage them to move along. The journalists who just last week were saying You see! Another Vietnam! are now damning the Yankees for their brutal haste and their choice of the only available ally for the ground campaign. (Let us pause to appreciate the richness.) You really cannot win with these people any more than you can with Islamic fanatics the mindset is not altered by experience. A friend writes a parody of the style: "Cherbourg France June 8 1944. ... The short-sighted strategy of the Allies to extend the German front lines is almost sure to backfire when the Nazis realize that we ourselves are over-extended and push us back into the sea. ..." For its liberation of Kabul the Northern Alliance entered the city from the north and east. A wise effort was made to cut off any possible Taliban retreat eastward to reinforce Jalalabad towards the Pakistan frontier along the old Grand Trunk Road. For this alone Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf should be grateful. Instead the retreat was funnelled down the old "A1" west then south towards Ghazni and Kandahar -- the Taliban driving their Datsun pick-ups into a killing zone of U.S. air power. (I have it from one source that the Americans are finally flying their Apaches an excellent strafing tool.) A fight for Jalalabad (which has been off the media radar since reporters were escorted there to view some accidental U.S. bomb damage three weeks ago) could have caused dangerous excitement across the frontier in Peshawar Pakistan. Except for an unattractive passage through snowy mountains to its south-west the city found itself quickly caught between the Northern Alliance and the Pakistan frontier. It would seem to have fallen too in the confused aftershocks from the fall of Kabul; the local Taliban either fleeing into the hills or defecting to anyone who will receive them. Here from information I received late yesterday we find the first promising evidence that the Pashtun themselves feel beaten and are turning on their former Taliban masters in the hope of saving themselves from their fate. But here we come to a conflict between "East" and "West" between our own delicate sensibilities and those which operate upon the other side. The impending assaults on the remaining Taliban strongholds -- if there are any before you read this in the morning -- will and must necessarily be brutally hard. The message to be conveyed to them is: "You are finished. Don't ever think you can revive again." The war on the ground is tribal long before it is ideological or religious. The parties to it are capable of exchanging ideological positions for a package of cigarettes; but almost all are devout Muslims. This unity in Islam is itself chimerical for the Pashtun are Sunnis of the Wahabi (puritanical) tendency whereas the others are mostly Shia or non-Wahabi Sunni: so they detest each other doctrinally too. The Taliban party of Mullah Omar never had the loyalty of any of the Persian and Turkic peoples it attempted to rule in the north and west. Nor did it ever attempt to win friends outside its narrowly Pashtun power base resorting quickly to executions and massacres to intimidate opposition in the north. It embraced its foreign chiefly Arab and Pakistani allies as an alternative to making compromises and its instinct is probably to hide now and surface again later. To Mullah Omar wherever he is now the country may seem lost for the moment but he can still hope his fanatical and intolerant Wahabi creed will live to fight another day; and that it can meanwhile cultivate and prey upon Pashtun paranoia and grievances. The strategy in the north has been almost to a fault to avoid civilian casualties. This is because we were dealing with civilians who were cheering for us behind Taliban backs; it made no sense to alienate their affection. But from here on we are dealing with a people who do not wish us well. The Pashtun have hardly been performing the little acts of disobedience and sabotage that helped speed the fall of Mazar Herat and nearly a dozen smaller northern cities. The Pastun at large are taking the measure of us trying to decide whether it is really necessary to surrender and how fast. What impresses them is not our sweetness and light our caution and tact and thoughtful anxieties. Nor has "magnanimity" the same connotations in Afghanistan that it has here. These people want instead to know how determined we are and how ruthless we can be in exterminating the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Force not charm will win the argument. Pashtun tribal chiefs were already vividly aware of what the rewards would be for defecting: cash up front plus a remunerative role in the "new Afghan order". But until now they weren't buying. They knew the carrot but weren't sure about the stick. "Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind is the closest I can find to an applicable Western proverb -- and in this case kindness requires that we do not turn down the heat. To actually end the war, we must clean up every pocket of resistance. To accept Pashtun tribal chiefs as allies, we must demand that they fetch us the necessary heads on the platter -- including those of Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri. That alone will minimize the total casualties, on all sides, to bring the war to an end, and make the right point. For the United States has also come to, and I think is now passing, the big test of public opinion throughout the Arab and Muslim world -- the test of its self-confidence. It was now or never to convince the Assads and Husseins, even the Sauds and Mubaraks, that the U.S. means business; that the Bush administration does not lose nerve, or pull punches. And the people themselves, under these regimes, were waiting to see what the U.S. would do. American prestige will be dramatically enhanced by the fall of the Taliban; and by its continuing pursuit of Al Qaeda. It is respect, not love, that the U.S. must seek. At the time of writing, the situation in the south of Afghanistan is completely fluid. The U.S. is apparently strafing and bombing remaining Taliban targets on a scale unprecedented since the attack on Iraq. Special forces are operating around Kandahar in numbers greater than the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had previously indicated. It is not impossible that Kandahar itself will follow Kabul into opposition hands immediately; there is already a report that its airport is in allied hands, and similar reports of Taliban collapses from Sindand in the west to Khowst in the east -- all across the southern flank of Afghanistan. I assume that, as apparently in Jalalabad, tribal chiefs are seizing assets as the Taliban melt away; for the Northern Alliance couldn't possibly have the strength to be making these conquests, being already stretched thin. The danger now is that the quick collapse leaves the allies with only a tenuous hold on this country, and having to bargain with Pashtun chiefs who are neither declared enemies, nor friends. Being Westerners, we will be tempted to forgive and to forget" to make peace terms so generous that the Taliban itself may have the chance to regroup in the hills and launch a new guerrilla campaign against whatever government the U.N. can install in Kabul. It would be a huge mistake to allow this to happen. It is time now to finish the job that was started and that includes letting our Afghan allies hunt down and kill such Taliban and Al Qaeda forces as have not surrendered. For the Pashtun chiefs the minimum requirement for escaping U.S. fury must be help in ferreting them out. It is not yet the moment for mercy. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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