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COMMENTARY
December 8, 2001
Kandahar plus
I'm afraid there is just more and more good news out of Afghanistan and my pacifist readers will have to endure it. "Put a fork in the Taliban they're done" was the Wall Street Journal's headline (in its Internet "Best of the Web Today" column whose refreshing bellicosity I can recommend to anyone). Kandahar seems fairly certainly in allied hands even if Mullah Omar has gone missing. (Though maybe he'll be found by the time this appears.) Like a one-eyed Cheshire cat he continues speaking even as he fades. According to the Pakistani daily Jang which enjoys a rapport with Islamist fanatics he has now announced to his supporters that the surrender which led half of them to lay down their arms and deliver themselves into the hands of the local anti-Taliban tribal warlord Mullah Naqibullah was a trick. It was designed Mullah Omar is quoted as saying to set his enemies against each other while the Taliban and their Al Qaeda friends slipped into the hills with their lethal weapons -- to "fight to the death" yet one more time. But it is open season on them once they are out of the city; for the one thing holding back U.S. and tribal strikes was the fear of collateral damage among the civilians the Taliban were using for cover. (Memo to other mullahs: A few more clever tricks like this and the infidels will take Mecca.) From reports out of Kandahar itself it appears what actually happened is the surviving Taliban and Al Qaeda defenders agreed among themselves to divide in two. This gave the mere functionaries and conscripts the opportunity to surrender and keep their lives while the Arabs Pakistanis and other serious fighters with no prospects of mercy anyway were left to make a run for it. It was perhaps the most reasonable arrangement Mullah Omar's forces have ever reached even among themselves. Needless to say the fleeing forces did one last round of looting through the city by way of equipping themselves for the trek ahead. For many if not most this trek is proving a short one. There is little cover from the air in any of the surrounding landscape and from such limited reports as I have seen the U.S. aircraft and marines are having a "strawberry harvest" -- their one problem being that they can't always be sure who is friend and who is foe now that both sides are wearing civilian garments (and a lot of refugees are still cluttering the roads). It will not do to risk picking off your allies. Elsewhere near Jalalabad both Pashtun and Northern Alliance troops with generous support from the U.S. Air Force have blown the requisite holes through the mountain cave complex of Tora Bora. Once again they do not find Osama bin Laden inside so that the possibility increases that the gentleman has somehow slipped across an international frontier. The Pakistani one was in walking distance if we postulate an exceptionally long tunnel through very high and impassably snow-capped mountains. (But on the other side at six-foot-four he will stand out fairly obviously in a burka.) Alternatively he was vapourized together with any witnesses in an earlier lucky strike and we are going to spend months chasing his shadow. "Whatever as we now say in such situations. Any way you cut the cards, they are all now marked in our favour. To understand this fully, it is necessary to reflect on the war aims with which the Bush administration set sail for Afghanistan. The purpose was to render Osama bin Laden's terror network incapable of operating from that country. And a man who can't even smuggle fresh propaganda videos out to Al Jazeera television in Qatar, is hardly in a position to send reinforcements to his associates in the West. We make a mistake if we vex ourselves unduly about our role in nation building" in Afghanistan -- or anywhere in the Muslim world. It really isn't any of our Western business to do more than answer calls for humanitarian assistance and intervene when we must to defend ourselves against real terrorist (and rogue-state missile) threats. Moreover it isn't in our power to intervene successfully except in short sharp moments. The Afghans now have every possible motive to make the best of the opportunities the U.S. and allied intervention has given them and we are better off praying for them than proferring unrequested strong-armed assistance. The calling card we leave should read simply Ask and it shall be answered. The interim Afghan government under Hamid Karzai will be installed Allah willing two weeks from today. Burhanuddin Rabbani the Northern Alliance's senior "don" who has yet to relinquish the presidential quarters in Kabul might still have something to say about that though it appears both his lieutenants and their American allies have him stared down. Mr. Karzai was an interesting and probably wise choice of interim government leader. He is a Pashtun "aristocrat" with ancestral tribal claims to the rule of Oruzgan a mountainous province to the north of Kandahar. He has no real military experience and thus is free of the impulse to kick over the chairs. He is Indian-educated can think in English and has a fairly Western cast of mind; but is fiercely independent in judgement (and in that way very Afghan) with a natural dispropensity to doing what he is told. Pakistan the country with the largest external interest in the new Afghan order is happily acclaiming him on an official level but Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (which made it their business to install the Taliban in the first place) now probably regrets having assassinated Mr. Karzai's father two years ago. It is the sort of thing a son tends to remember. He (the younger Karzai) was himself run out of Quetta by the ISI when he began organizing anti-Taliban forces among Pashtun refugees there. Though earlier still he had himself made common cause with the Taliban against what is today the Northern Alliance. The U.N.-brokered Bonn agreement creates a 30-member interim authority under Mr. Karzai. The former king Zahir Shah then convenes a loya jirga or traditional tribal assembly (plus token exiles intellectuals and women) next summer to create a "transitional" government that will in turn hand over to an "elected" one in 2004. For now it would be pointless to look much beyond Dec. 22 and ask what the composition of the interim administration means for the present and immediate future. There are 18 members from the Northern Alliance factions 11 Pashtuns at least superficially loyal to the ex-king and only one representative from the "Peshawar group" of Afghan exiles. The proxies of Pakistan Iran and Russia have been successfully blackballed. Two women got in both in significant positions (one a Shia Hazara who will be a deputy prime minister). In compensation all the "power portfolia" -- foreign affairs defence and interior -- went to Tadzhiks from the Panjshir Valley but all legatees of the late Ahmed Shah Massoud the now legendary anti-Communist then anti-Taliban warrior rather than agents of Mr. Rabbani. Rashid Dostum the vicious Uzbek warlord; Gulbuddin Hikmatyar Pakistan's "hatchet man"; and Abdulrab Rasul Sayyaf who is Saudi Arabia's -- all were left on the cutting-room floor. Mr. Dostum especially like Mr. Rabbani may prove hard to contain there. What is shaping up with this configuration is a government that will tend to ally itself with the United States and India and to be chary of its immediate neighbours. Which is a reason to pray for it with some fervour. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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