http://www.malaysiakini.com/Column/2001/10/2001101901.php3

Bombing into a quagmire

CHIAROSCURO

MGG Pillai

12:38pm, Fri: And so the United States and Britain march merrily, with trumpets blowing, into the quagmire of Afghanistan: For Washington, yet another folly in Asia after Korea and Vietnam; for Britain, her fourth Afghan war. The line they drew on the rugged hills of Afghanistan to force the Taliban to vomit Osama bin Laden into the American lap is as unworkable as Mr Durand's more than a century ago which separated Afghanistan from British India.

The bombs drop with horrifying inaccuracy, killing Afghans, and help; these sophisticated marvels of death, so advanced, once we were told, to distinguish friend from foe, but only as good as the fellow who operates it; indeed, a computer keying-in error dropped one set of bombs on a village. That, we are now told, is unavoidable.

But more died than the Taliban's claim of 300. No one keeps records out of the main towns, and Afghans do not live in well-ordered towns and villages but in the very hills and wasteland that Anglo-Saxon vengeance is directed. Even in Vietnam, during the war, more died than Washington would admit. But it is a fair bet that many bombs dropped on the craggy hills where, if Washington is correct, Osama and his band live is where many Afghans also live.

Assumptions and reality

The AC-130 gunships, more frightening than its cousins in the Vietnam war, is brought into the US air force armoury. The anti-aircraft defences are all but flattened and these low-flying death machines can now safely bomb the hills and Afghans with impunity. As in Vietnam, political correctness holds that any Afghan in the line of fire in the hills and mountains is, ipso facto, a Taliban terrorist. So, he deserves to die.

It is these assumptions that jar reality in Afghanistan. The wide gulf between the official statement and the facile brilliance of the Osama public relations threatens Anglo-Saxon coalition to tatters. More physical or satellite evidence of carnage would force the coalition to be marked, if not already, as bullies. CNN in Baghdad a decade earlier sunk the carefully-crafted Gulf war to destroy Saddam Hussein. Al-Jazeera now threatens Washington propaganda on the war.

The heat is scorching. It does not matter if CNN or American networks ignore the Osama tapes, but Al-Jazeera broadcasts it throughout the Middle East. The US heavy-handedness is what we have come to expect. It is no wonder that journalists are viewed with suspicion in many countries of the world, where they are seen as the advance guard of a government, not the disinterested reporters and commentators they claim they are.

Now, even President George W Bush is prepared to appear on Al-Jazeera. CNN has even offered an unusual deal to Osama: It wants him to answer six questions and promises (to the US government) it would not air them, if what he says is not what it expects him to say. If I were Osama, I would accept it, and broadcast the answers through Al-Jazeera so that it does not matter if CNN broadcasts it or not.

Nor do we find it unusual that print and television journalists in the US, though less so in Britain, hang up their objectivity and the rules of journalism to fall in line with the war's propaganda aims. Make no mistake, the news we hear is nothing but.

Washington tries to shore up the propaganda battle it loses sight of. The war on terror, like that on drugs in the 1980s, was a quick-fix to an immediate problem: the humiliation after the brazen attack on Sept 11 on US military, financial, political power. The culprit was quickly identified, the area determined, a hasty coalition formed, and before you could say "Uncle Sam", the bombs were on their way to Afghanistan.

Coalition in tatters

The coalition is in tatters. The war widens by the day, and Osama has called for a jihad. More than that, the Taliban is not about to give up, defiance writ on their collective replies, as the bombing gets worse. Washington now decides to reorder the government of Afghanistan when the reality struck home: that its allies in this Afghan adventure, the Northern Alliance, would only ensure more uncertainty, and the crimes it accuses the Taliban of could as well be laid on the Northern Alliance.

It faces the same conundrum it faced in Iraq: If you destroy Saddam Hussein, could the new rulers hold Iraq together and be an American satrap in the Middle East? Obviously, they could not, and so Saddam Hussein was left alone. So, it is no more Osama that the Anglo-Saxon coalition deals with; it is what happens to the country after the Taliban is deposed. It does not matter who forms the government; that cannot come until after the Anglo-Saxon troops go in.

No one talks of Osama much these days. It is Taliban and their perfidy to refuse to hand him over. It does not matter, in US eyes, that the charges against him would not stand up in a court of law. He is who he is, and he must be hanged, drawn and quartered. But as Washington and London step into the quagmire, all that is forgotten. Who harbours him must first be destroyed. But the Taliban cannot be destroyed without more uncertainty. And, strangely, few in the coalition want anything more than watch from the sidelines.

If it lays open a political option in which it would have to fight alone. I cannot see any coalition member, Muslim or non-Muslim, to want its soldiers carved, hacked, mutilated as British were a century, and Russians two decades, earlier. Even a UN force could not keep the peace, even without untold casualties. For as someone said recently, "You can rent Afghanistan, but you cannot buy it."

But before this peacekeeping force comes, the ground troops must come in. Sending in the Northern Alliance will not help. It would come in as a conquering army of foreigners, to be destroyed, as others were in its tangled, tortuous 2,000-year history of Afghanistan. The ground troops must do what bombs cannot to make headway. With Ramadan and winter in four weeks, could they?