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Afghanistan - The Futile Campaign
(Madeleine Bunting, Ghe Guardian, May 20, 2002)
The only sensible conclusion is that we know as much about Operation Condor as we do about its predecessors - Anaconda, Ptarmigan, Snipe - and before that, Tora Bora: very, very little. Follow the reports for the past six months and there is a ludicrous pattern of claims of victory, then a few discordant details trickle out and, finally, an admission of failure. So, now we know that Tora Bora was regarded as one of the "gravest errors of the war": the US depended too heavily on unreliable Afghan fighters. Osama bin Laden and many AQT fighters managed to escape. . . . Afghanistan is in danger of becoming the most embarrassing chapter in the recent history of British military engagements. . . . Afghanistan offered the perfect solution to September 11 - a massive expiation of US anger and, more subtly, guilt. Dropping all those bombs felt doubly good: it was retaliation for a terrible crime, but also getting rid of an evil regime. The emotional rush was everything; whether the latter actually worked has fallen off most people's radar screen. They're not interested. The selective memory means that what is remembered is that a few women in Kabul threw off their burkas in November, not that many more women in northern Afghanistan have been raped since then in a wave of ethnic revenge against the Pashtun. Nor is anyone much interested that since the fall of the Taliban, the old lawlessness of highway looting and illegal road tolls has re-emerged. Or that in the past few months there have been at least two major conflicts between warlords - in Mazar-i-Sharif and in Gardez - as an uneasy truce awaits the results of next month's loya jirga. . . . The war was a crude and clumsy intervention which did little for the wretched Afghans, and even less for the struggle against terrorism.

posted by LoZo 8:43 AM