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COMMENTARY
November 17, 2001
Afghan endgame
Ramadan is now in progress the Islamic fasting season that began with the Arabian sighting of the new fingernail of moon; the season that commemorates the divine inspiration to Muhammad when he began to write down the Koran at the command of the messenger of Allah. It is the time to turn the mind from the worldly to the unworldly. Among others this year President Bush has sent formal Ramadan greetings to the Muslims of the United States and around the world the first president to do so. And the Bush administration has made clear there will be no let-up in the struggle to uproot the Al Qaeda terrorist organization whether in Afghanistan or anywhere. While Islamist preachers were reported to be leading their congregations in prayers yesterday in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and probably elsewhere for the destruction of America and the victory of the Taliban it would not appear that such prayers are being answered. In Pakistan for instance I have noticed signs of the opposite tendency. To take just one example the website Paknews.com which until last week was running the most discouraging reports of Pashtun and Muslim rage and resistance has now installed a little insignia at the top of its "links" bar showing the U.S. and Pakistan flags flying proudly together. Shall we count this as progress? Within Afghanistan itself the fear that the Taliban was simply fading into the hills to prepare for an interminable guerrilla war is somewhat assuaged. This is what they should have done if their intention was to prolong the war and they had any brains. Instead through dithering and the destruction of their entire system of communication they have found themselves surrounded in about ten discrete locations in none of which they can reasonably hope to survive. Some certainly are disappearing from view but whether they re-emerge as guerrilla fighters will depend on how effectively the U.S. and its ground allies close down every possible source of support for them. At the time of writing the chief last Taliban stands were at Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south. In both places fairly large numbers probably in the thousands of Al Qaeda's Arab Pakistani and other foreign operatives refuse to throw in the towel. Their reason for refusing is that the Northern Alliance troops (around Kunduz) and suddenly pro-American Pashtun tribesmen (around Kandahar) are determined to kill them all whether or not they surrender. So they might as well fight to the death -- which is meanwhile coming chiefly from the skies in the form of U.S. air strikes which melt them down as they did their colleagues on the Kabul front. Elsewhere isolated but sometimes large mixed Taliban/Al Qaeda companies have found themselves trapped away from cities and the threat of collateral damage their commanders no longer able to negotiate surrenders in return for the usual cash considerations. In almost every case their problem is that the Arabs and Pakistanis among them will shoot them if they try to give up. The result is an incomparable bloodletting again usually accomplished from the air in which the West is incidentally witnessing the demise of many thousands of the sorts of characters who hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. When the ground battle follows surviving Taliban are as likely as not to turn their guns on the Al Qaeda foreigners in the last desperate hope of saving their own skins. Rather than wringing our hands at the carnage we should be sighing with relief. So indeed should be the sheikhs of Arabia and the civil government of Pakistan who need no longer await the homecomings of these fanatics who would spread mayhem through their own societies if they could. I gather that in addition to flying helicopters now the U.S. has put its "Warthogs" into play. These are mean-looking flying machines which carry an extraordinary variety of ordnance and can remain in theatre for attractively long periods circling and looking for more life to extinguish. They and other close-order aircraft are now taking advantage of a growing number of airstrips that U.S. and British special forces have marked and are guarding allowing for a more and more rapid deployment of forces both ground and airborne. The search for and destruction of Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership while they scramble for plausible cover is now in high gear aided especially by this expansion of the U.S. ground presence. U.S. "Predator" pilots (ground-based for the plane is remote-controlled) would seem to have scored a significant bullseye on a house where an emergency meeting was taking place off the road between Kabul and Ghazni. Tipped off by Taliban defectors they fired a small missile into the building incinerating among others Mohammed Atef who was Osama bin Laden's principal military advisor since the early 1990s and a potential successor to him. The special forces are now working with huge advantages they did not have a mere week ago. Previously they used excellent cartographic information supplied by John Shroder Jr. the University of Nebraska geology professor who happened to have conducted an extensive study of Afghan cave systems in the days immediately before the Russian occupation. This was being supplemented by the memoirs of Russian war veterans and Northern Alliance officers who had used the same retreats while fighting the Russians. But the field of possibilities was too wide and the danger of harming innocent goatherds and the like too great to hit targets with much enthusiasm or confidence. Now the U.S. forces are receiving tips directly from Pashtun tribesmen in the south lubricated by substantial before-and-after cash rewards pointing them to the most likely cave and bunker complexes where the enemy may be hiding. Ground operatives can now go to location to find the co-ordinates for cave openings and bunker ventilation shafts which were very hard to spot or fix from the air or by satellite. Depending on the nature of the opening they can then order the appropriate munitions to clear the insides. In the case of large cave complexes internal steel doors and secret exitways are not an insuperable problem. Laser-guided bombs can fly accurately in the mouths of the tunnels knocking through any initial barrier. Likewise the earth-penetrating "bunker busters" can widen the openings to the requisite size for bombers to drop fuel-air explosives. These spray a cloud of aerosol fuel which then ignites. As David Hackworth a retired U.S. Army colonel with some expertise in this area explained to the Associated Press: "What happens is the force of the explosion sucks out and burns the oxygen inside of the hole. It produces a tremendous downdraft of heat." As a French journalist who saw an earlier version of one of these bombs explode in the distance over Iraqi forces in Kuwait during the conflict of 1991 exclaimed mistakenly My God the Yankees are using atom bombs! In reality it just looks that way. Part of the intended effect is the indelible impression such explosions leave on the people who live to describe them. And this is very much a part of the propaganda war. If the U.S. wants to get and keep reliable allies in the Muslim world it must convince leaders and people alike that it has awesome power and that it is quite prepared to use it. Respect does not necessarily lead to love but it doesn't have to. Likewise by killing rather than capturing and putting on "O.J. Simpson" trial its most lethal enemies and in large numbers the U.S. is -- contrary to the repeated views of those "nattering nabobs of negativism" -- effectively discouraging young Islamists in the future from joining the ranks of terrorist organizations. It is one thing to imagine yourself as an heroic suicide bomber taking out symbols of U.S. status and wealth to the posthumous applause of friends relatives and the screaming mob; another to know that you will die ignominiously in some remote uncharted hellhole having accomplished nothing. On the humanitarian front marvellous progress is now being achieved. According to the U.N. World Food Programme enough food is now entering Afghanistan by road and barge (riverborne across the Uzbek frontier from Termex to Hairaton) to feed the six million who are hungry and more success is being had each day in distributing it where needed. The WFP's agents -- including Afghan women whom they are employing again after the five years of Taliban rule -- will soon emerge among the real heroes of this Afghan campaign. But unfortunately the other United Nations effort to broker an interim national government acceptable to all parties -- not only all the ethnic factions within Afghanistan but all the states around its borders plus the U.S. and Russia -- is moving along at the more customary diplomatic speed. The chief problem is not coming from within the country where the Northern Alliance has been remarkably reluctant to seize all the instruments of power in Kabul. Its civilian Tadzhik leader the still-nominal president of Afghanistan Burhanuddin Rabbani seems to be patiently keeping his promise not to re-install himself. But it is almost impossible to please simultaneously Pakistan and Iran whose proxies and interests within the conflict are mortally opposed. Iran is being slightly more reasonable Pakistan has more at stake and is determined to see friendly Pashtun faces behind its long ungovernable frontier. For practical purposes the accumulation of U.S. and European ground forces (those visible mostly helping with the massive relief operations) will help to keep the peace between and spread calm among the ethnic factions. And the continuing effort to find and destroy surviving elements of the Taliban and Al Qaeda keep the warriors from all other sides focused and their time occupied. Afghanistan is not only the first but the easiest front in the developing war against the Islamist terror networks. There is still for instance Iraq to consider with its growing stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. But I think we can say that Afghanistan is now in hand and that a good pace has been set for the battles ahead. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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