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COMMENTARY
November 28, 2001
The tea leaves
Like firemen into the World Trade Centre the U.S. Marines have been going into their positions from their new base near Kandahar. There will be casualties though we may hope not as many as in New York. It is a fresh engagement against the same enemy. This new air base and marine command post is an appropriated private airport in the Rigestan desert built by a Saudi prince to support such pleasures as falconry. Among its accommodations is a small private mosque which could be put to temporary use as a chapel for the U.S. soldiers a high proportion of whom are incidentally either "born again" or Catholic Christians. (While it is not true that there are no atheists in foxholes religious believers do tend to volunteer disproportionately for the more dangerous jobs.) But in the words of Lt. Cmdr. Donald Troast the navy chaplain who saw them off from the helicopter flight deck of the USS Peleliu in the Arabian Sea: "I asked God to bless every one of them. I don't care what their religion is." The mission became necessary as it emerged that anti-Taliban Pashtun and Baluchi tribesmen could not take Kandahar with or without the support of U.S. bombers and special forces. They are not well enough trained or organized and it would be dangerous to everyone to allow the non-Pashtun tribes of the Northern Alliance to reinforce them; besides these latter are still needed clearing the north. Because the Americans are determined to limit civilian casualties they cannot simply level Kandahar and other settlements still in Taliban or Al Qaeda hands. The connection should be made not implied: many of these U.S. soldiers may lose their lives in order to spare Afghan civilians. Nevertheless only part of the marines' work will consist of adding to the weight of the assault on Kandahar. Most of the job consists of cutting off roads and supplies and intercepting enemy units trying to fade with their weapons into the hills; performing ambushes on isolated enemy positions; and besieging cave and other complexes in which Taliban and Al Qaeda are holed up. Moreover the more eyes the U.S. has on the ground the more accurate the air strikes. According to Afghan sources Mullah Omar is certainly still in Kandahar and there is a possibility that both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri are in there with him. I think some credence should be given to their hunch for it is not in the "psychological profile" of any of these men to make a quiet exit from this world. A last stand in Kandahar would give them their best chance to go out in style in a hail of intensely publicized gunfire a la Bonnie and Clyde and with their respective "last wills and testaments" then airing on Al Jazeera satellite TV across the Arab and Muslim world. (I have been told by a plausible source in Qatar that the U.S. government actually requested that the emirate raid the Al Jazeera studios in Doha in search of such a bin Laden "last will and testament" video which might well contain extremely useful information about his present whereabouts and plans. But that this request was denied.) There is a more complex political motive for the mission though it would not stand alone. By claiming a patch of the Afghan landscape the U.S. is writing itself into a bargaining position in the domestic trade-offs to form a new government. It has no interest in playing these cards itself but could use them to improve the hand of a benign but weak player at the table such as Zahir Shah the former Afghan king. In press conferences and interviews since the marines began landing U.S. officials have struggled to keep the media's eye on the ball. There is plenty of unfinished work left in Afghanistan including the most brutal ground encounters likely yet to come. As we saw from the "prison uprising" in the north we are up against an enemy that has been trained -- many of them from early childhood in the "Islamist" madrasas of Pakistan and elsewhere -- to die fighting and killing. They are brutish savages but it is the only life they know. The riot in the sprawling mud-walled 18th-century fortress in the vicinity of Balkh west of Mazar-i-Sharif (its walled area is eight times the size of Jerusalem's) was apparently touched off when Al Qaeda fighters spotted the white face of a British journalist and went berserk. We can only hope that the appearance of U.S. soldiers at Kandahar will not prove good for enemy morale. Meanwhile unconfirmable reports continue to circulate of U.S. intelligence and special forces activity -- scouting and the like -- on the ground in Somalia and even Yemen and the Sudan. The London Sunday Times led with such a story patched together from the rumour mills of Washington; and from similar sources I hear another suggestion that U.S. operatives are on the ground with anti-regime Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq. They would be trying to make the sort of connexions the U.S. sought with the Afghan Northern Alliance in the first weeks after "9/11" -- but this time at a more leisurely pace and in advance. The net is inexorably casting wider and a new wave of European and Muslim anxiety is being expressed at the prospect of a "globalization" of the Afghan battle. For the Europeans there is the further galling experience that token forces they had sea-mailed or put on standby for a long Afghan battle now seem unneeded or unwanted. The idea that international terrorism could be defeated by a campaign of pure rhetorical disapproval (mostly against the U.S.) is therefore making a recovery in the European press. There is a time for violent language and a time for violent action but we no longer seem to teach in our schools that these are not the same times. Both are in a sense a form of communication sufficient in themselves. Violent language forces people to think violent action forces them to act -- whether with you or against you. Among the civilized action follows from thought; among the barbaric action from action. Which is why we find barbaric people -- such as those misbehaving in our downmarket taverns or "Islamist" terrorists -- yell and act violently at the same time. I have been quite struck by the absence of violent language in the Bush administration's pronouncements on its widening war against the terror networks. They tend instinctively to understatement as the preceding administration tended to overstatement. It is a contrast between acts and words; and no I don't think President Bush's use of the term "evil-doers" is a rhetorical overstatement. The contrast is especially apparent in what I'm able to learn of the diplomatic "style" of Mr. Bush Colin Powell Condoleezza Rice Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney the administration's five co-ordinated voices in world affairs. They never shout and they eschew emotionally loaded vocabulary. In a sense President Bush has raised a natural inarticulacy to a high level as a communications skill: the spray of unsyntactical colloquial language delivers both the statement and its qualifications at the same time. This in turn sets up the shock when in a speech or at an important press conference he suddenly switches to syntactical English to say: "Make no mistake." This in contrast to the European leaders starting with Tony Blair but including Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac and even Silvio Berlusconi who communicate alarm when they drift from sounding smug. There is little real leadership there. I think it is important to be alive to this contrast as we try to divine the events unfolding. We have already done one "lap" of this war which began with Europe expressing all kinds of reservations and anxieties about the use of force even in Afghanistan and which is ending with the successful U.S. attack on the Afghan Taliban regime and Europe's politicians sighing Amen . But now ministers such as Joschka Fischer the former radical streetfighter who is Germany's Green-party foreign minister (he once decked a policeman) are using exactly the same language to express their reservations and anxieties about further U.S. military action. Typically we are given the veiled threat to rescind European co-operation in the intelligence security and financial campaigns against the terror networks. But this is pure bluff the Europeans themselves are targets of "Islamist" terrorism and they know it; their self-interest dictates an extremely high level of co-operation for the indefinite future. In reality they are trying to stay onside with the response of their intellectual elites which combines an inherited "genteel" anti-Americanism with a more visceral bed-wetting impulse. The United States has elites like that too -- the Clinton administration often deferred to them -- but the American national situation has tended to produce a kind of "take charge" intelligentsia that is used to ruling. Britain had such "take charge" intellectuals too in the days when the Royal Navy actually did patrol the high seas. (Call them "imperialists" I have no objection.) For when you are in fact a superpower you cannot afford to ignore the likely consequences of your actions or inactions. The U.S. does bear the primary responsibility for the safety of the Western world does in fact carry the lion's share of the cost of defending it both in blood and money. It does not have the luxury of living in cloud cuckoo land for extended periods. I am saying all this by way of explaining what I think is about to happen -- not in the next few days nor even weeks but in the time frame between now and the spring. From what I understand the Bush administration will decide it has no choice but to extend the theatre of military action and to depose more regimes. For anyone who is sensitive to such things I notice the administration is now deploying its trademark understatement on Iraq. President Bush phrased his demand for the resumption of U.N. weapons inspections almost as an afterthought; it was part of off-the-cuff remarks after the White House reception for Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry. But the response from Iraq was extremely formal and delivered with the usual bluster of threats and counter-threats by the Iraqi foreign ministry within a few hours. The battle for Iraq has thus begun in a small modest way. And it was begun without any broad survey of European views. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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