dDH Vredessite; Nieuws 2001: Weekjournaal Nieuwe Oorlog week 51

3500 AFGHAANSE BURGERS GEDOOD DOOR VS-BOMMEN

Durham, New Hamshire - Meer dan 3500 burgers vonden de dood door
Amerikaanse bombardementen in Afghanistan. Dit blijkt uit onderzoek
van Marc W. Herold, professor Economie aan de Universiteit van New
Hampshire.

Professor Herold verzamelde vanaf 7 oktober, de dag dat Amerika
begon met de bombardementen, dagelijks informatie over
burgerslachtoffers in Afghanistan. Hij hield het aantal
slachtoffers bij met locatie, wapentype en informatiebron(nen).
Hiervoor maakte hij gebruik van Britse, Canadese en Australische
kranten, Indische kranten - met name The Times of India - drie
Pakistaanse dagbladen, the Singapore News, Afghan Islamic Press,
Agence France Presse, Pakistan News Service, Reuters, BBC News
Online, Al Jazeera en verschillende andere bronnen, waaronder de
Verenigde Naties en andere hulporganisaties. Professor Herold
streefde er daarbij naar om zijn informatie over ieder geval steeds
ook bij andere bronnen na te trekken, waar dit mogelijk was.

Het Pentagon ontkent herhaaldelijk meldingen van burgerslachtoffers
in Afghanistan en de meeste Amerikaanse mediabronnen noemen hun
verslaggeving over Afghaanse slachtoffers  'niet onafhankelijk te
bevestigen'. Uit het onderzoek van professor Herold blijkt echter
dat het aantal dodelijke slachtoffers tegen de 4000 loopt . "Mensen
moeten weten dat oorlog mensenlevens kost", aldus Herold. "Dit is
een oorlog met duizenden slachtoffers. Slachtoffers die niets te
maken hadden met de gebeurtenissen op 11 september."

Het onderzoek is te vinden op: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/

============================================================

FIGHTING THE WRONG WAR

Afghans have paid a high price for a campaign that has failed to
meet its original aims

Jonathan Steele
Tuesday December 11, 2001
The Guardian

The toppling of the Taliban may eventually prove to be the best
thing to have happened in Afghanistan for a decade. But it was not
an initial aim of the US-led war. In the wake of their departure
from Kandahar, that point cannot be stressed enough, before the
drumbeat of triumpalism deafens us all. Victory over the wrong
opponent is not much of a victory. It sounds more like "collateral
benefit" - provided we are sure the benefit outweighs the costs.

Remember the war's stated purpose: to bring to justice those who
had helped to mastermind the atrocities of September 11, and
eliminate the bases where the terrorists had learned their skills.
All the information available (and it was known before the first
missile was launched against Afghanistan) suggests that the 19
hijackers trained for their mission in Europe and the United
States, and entered the US with legal visas. Evidence that they
personally had any connection with Afghanistan has been minimal,
verging on nil. No suggestion has ever been made that any of the
al-Qaida network were Afghans.

That Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida, had lived in
Afghanistan for over five years was well known. That he had
inspired the concept of a high-profile attack on US targets of
symbolic national significance - without necessarily choosing the
methods, the timing or the men - was a reasonable suspicion. But
where does that put the Taliban? There has been much indignant talk
about "people who harbour terrorists". Unload the emotion, and this
is not much more useful than describing European states which
decline to deport murder suspects to the US as "people who harbour
killers".

More importantly, the Taliban had no way of enforcing their will on
Bin Laden. If Donald Rumsfeld, with his infra-red laser-guided
heat-seeking cave-buster bombs, cannot find Bin Laden after nine
weeks on the job, how does he expect the Taliban to have done
better? As Ahmed Rashid's excellent book on the Taliban makes
abundantly clear, Mullah Mohammed Omar is no Saddam Hussein or
Slobodan Milosevic. He did not run a "war machine" or a "police
state". Afghanistan was an impoverished and destroyed society with
minimal infrastructure, in which the concept of governance meant
nothing more than the use of a few satellite telephones to issue
social edicts which the so-called religious police enforced. Almost
every urban service, from education to health to food, was provided
by outside aid agencies or privately by Afghans on their own.
Villages had to fend for themselves.

To imagine that in such a vacuum of government the Taliban could
arrest Bin Laden was laughable, although Mullah Omar did, of
course, ask a shura of religious leaders to consider the problem
and they did recommend Bin Laden leave Afghanistan and be tried
before an Islamic court elsewhere. If toppling the Taliban arrived
late as a war aim (Tony Blair only stated it unequivocally on
October 30, three weeks into the bombing campaign), it seems to
have emerged through desperation and cynicism. Realising that
finding Bin Laden might prove impossible, the war leaders turned
their sights on the Taliban instead. Politically, they were easy
meat. Few in the western world, women or men, would grieve to see
them go. Commie-bashing was never as simple as this.

I hold no brief for the Taliban, but I also hold no brief for an
approach to politics which consists of demonising your opponents,
over-personalising issues and evading nuanced judgments. The
Taliban were not monsters. They were a wild mixture of religious
fundamentalism, puritan ideology, Pashtun nationalism and the
social norms of the Afghan village, common to every Afghan ethnic
group. Go to the Afghan districts of Quetta in Pakistan, or watch
the TV pictures of "liberated" Kabul, and you will see the burka
everywhere. The total veiling of women did not begin with the
Taliban, and has not ended with their demise.

In an earlier war western governments and compliant journalists
demonised Afghanistan's communists, ignoring the fact that their
social and gender policies throughout the 1980s were enlightened.
In those days the west armed and aided the fundamentalists and
those who wanted to deny women's rights. So demonising the Taliban
came naturally. Yet, as aid agencies have testified, the Taliban
produced order in place of civil war. "With the Taliban there was
a certain amount of security in the areas they controlled. I
wouldn't say the Taliban were supportive, but a lot of aid went in
- there was acceptance," says John Fairhurst, Oxfam's programme
director for Afghanistan. "Now we have local commanders looking to
take advantage of the collapse. You also have bandits thinking they
have more freedom to operate".

Legally, it is doubtful whether the two UN resolutions which
preceded the military strikes permitted an attack on the Taliban,
as opposed to al-Qaida. What of the costs of the bombing? Perhaps
around 1,500 innocent people have been killed, if one assumes an
accident rate of about 150 a week. (America's anti-Taliban allies
in Jalalabad reported as many as 300 civilian victims in that one
area last week.) The air strikes have driven at least 600,000
people from their homes. This is comparable with Milosevic's
deportations from Kosovo during the Nato bombardment. But while he
committed his crimes in springtime, with a host of agencies to help
the refugees as they crossed the border, the US launched its Afghan
assault in winter, in a situation where neighbouring countries
would only grudgingly open their gates.

Half the population of Kandahar, a third of Kabul, and thousands
more from the north, fled the terror and were left wandering inside
Afghanistan in cold and hunger. Not much of this has reached the
world's attention. Two years ago the remote town of Kukes in
Albania was host to hundreds of reporters and film crews sending
daily interviews with refugees to eager editors. In this war the
comparable town of Chaman in Pakistan produced few such dispatches,
barely one a week per paper - the refrain became: "My desk just
glazes over if I suggest another refugee story".

Finally, there is the time lost in delivering food, blankets and
medicine to the hundreds of thousands people displaced by drought
before the bombing started. For three months very little aid has
been going in. "The politics have changed dramatically but the
humanitarian situation remains dire," says Tim Pitt of Medecins
sans Frontieres. "Before September 11 we were reaching upwards of
one million people. Now it's less than that".

With the fall of the Taliban, Tony Blair talks of "total
vindication" and supporters of the war call for apologies from
those who opposed it. OK, I was wrong. On October 6, I wrote:
"Missile strikes will just be the hors d'oeuvre. The main meal will
be a sustained campaign to arm the Taliban's opponents, the
Northern Alliance, so that they can seize Kabul and take power." I
am truly sorry - I never thought the air war would be so off
target, and bring so much misery to so many innocent Afghans.

Toppling the Taliban may eventually give Afghanistan the chance of
good government. Many of those in the interim authority are
modernisers, rather than jihadis; there is an ethnic balance;
foreign governments may send in an efficient peacekeeping force to
keep the warlords at bay; aid flows may be restored to
pre-September levels. But these possible benefits are in the
future. The costs have already been paid.

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

Bron: The Guardian (UK), 11 december 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4317240,00.html

========================================================

POWELL LOSES POWER OVER PENTAGON

The military success in Afghanistan has shifted control of US
foreign policy back to the hawks, writes Julian Borger

Julian Borger
Tuesday December 11, 2001
The Guardian

It is not over yet, of course. The hunt for al-Qaida in the Afghan
highlands is a difficult, dirty and highly dangerous task for the
soldiers involved, but the successes of the campaign so far have
already imparted their momentum on the groundwork for action
elsewhere.

In Afghanistan, as in Kosovo, overwhelming air power appears once
again to have been decisive, and the sense of opportunity is
tangible among the administration's hawks.

This is the moment, they are arguing, to flush out other rogue
threats to US national security, in Iraq, and an ever-lengthening
list of weak and failed states thought to harbour terrorists -
Somalia, Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia and so on.

Barring a disaster in the Afghan endgame, the campaign will serve
to bury yet deeper American fears of Vietnam-like quagmires. The
extraordinary capability of US technology demonstrated in Desert
Storm, Kosovo and now Afghanistan has unshackled a new military
self-confidence, held in check for more than a decade by the
constraints of the risk-averse Powell doctrine.

That stipulated that the US should either go to war with all its
might, planes, missiles and armoured divisions - or not at all. The
new lessons suggest instead that wars can be won with only a few
hundred soldiers equipped with state-of-the-art equipment.

The decline of the old doctrine is also a blow to its author, Colin
Powell, the secretary of state. His influence and his advocacy of
multilateral solutions to US foreign policy challenges had appeared
to be on the wane even before September 11, and he was emerging as
a lone voice in an instinctively unilateralist administration.

After the terrorist attacks, however, he seemed suddenly to be the
indispensable man, as Washington scrambled to build coalitions to
support its war on terrorism.

Now the wheel has turned full circle. The Pentagon triumphed with
only a few body bags. Grave warnings from the state department that
the war would trigger uprisings across the Islamic world have been
proved groundless. The bombing of Afghanistan even continued
through Ramadan without much controversy.

America's sense of interdependence with the rest of the world,
which seemed so profound on September 12, is now an uncomfortable
memory in the Bush administration.

As the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, pointedly told a
gathering of defence policy wonks in Washington: "The mission
determines the coalition. The coalition must not determine the
mission."

To provide just one symptom of the new mood, after hinting at the
height of the terrorism crisis that the US might be interested
after all in giving some teeth to the 1972 Biological Weapons
Convention, US negotiators last week torpedoed any chance of an
agreement on the issue.

The chief negotiator at the talks, John Bolton, is an
undersecretary of state forced on to the state department by the
White House over the protests of his nominal boss, Powell. He is
the Pentagon's man in state. Powell does not have a counterweight
in the defence department.

The policy competition between the state department and the
Pentagon is in some ways a structural phenomenon in all
administrations, but Powell's rivalry with Rumsfeld and his
ideologue deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, stands out for its depth and
visibility.

John Pike, a strategic analyst at the online intelligence
newsletter, GlobalSecurity.com, believes "there's never been this
sort of extreme polarisation that will play out over the next
couple of months."

President Bush has encouraged the fierce debate, listening to both
sides before making decisions. By all accounts the role of the
national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, is more to crystallise
the issues than to add the casting vote. That is more likely to
come from the vice-president, Dick Cheney, or Bush himself.

Nevertheless, it is significant that in Rice's national security
council, there are more voices echoing the Pentagon than
empathising with the diplomats at state department. The scales are
likely to be tilted even further to the hawks after the departure
this month of Bruce Reidel, a Clinton holdover, who has a great
deal of knowledge of, and sensitivity towards, the Arab world.

The hawks' candidate to replace him is Zalmay Khalizad, an
Afghan-American currently involved in the effort to build a
post-Taliban Afghan government.

If Khalizad is given the Middle East brief, and it appears the
fight for the job is still very much on, it will mark a substantial
gain for the Pentagon line on the Middle East. Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz did not want the US special envoys, General Anthony Zinni
and William Burns, to be sent to the region - a decision taken by
state and supported by Reidel and consequently Rice.

Washington, the Pentagon argued, should not try to exert pressure
on Israel, a key ally at a critical moment. Bending over backwards
to accommodate Arab opinion would in the long term only undermine
the anti-terrorist campaign.

In the short term, at least, the upsurge in Israeli-Palestinian
violence has won the argument for them, critically undermining the
Zinni-Burns mission at its outset. The White House consequently
dropped the traditional appeal to both sides to exercise caution,
the blame was focused on Arafat, and nothing said by Washington
about the heavy Israeli retaliation.

Most significantly of all was the very fact that the Pentagon had
a central place at the table in the discussion of Middle East
policy, which has traditionally been the preserve of the state
department and the national security council.

So, while the state-defence, Powell-Rumsfeld, debate continues to
push forwards, backwards and sideways with the flow of events as it
always has, the weekly shifts in policy mask broader strategic
gains by the Pentagon, which is now the dominant department by far.

That could have important consequences for Middle East policy, the
future of Afghanistan and, of course, the fate of Iraq.

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

Bron: The Guardian (UK), 11 december 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4317861,00.html

===========================================================

A WARNING SHOT ACROSS THE BOWS

Divisions are emerging between the military and the politicians -
and between Britain and America - over our role in the war on
terror

Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday December 12, 2001
The Guardian

It has taken Britain's top military officer to say publicly what
may seem obvious but which ministers do not like being reminded of.
You cannot win the "war" against terrorism by bombing. Indeed,
military action could have precisely the opposite effect to the one
intended, he warned.

In a candid speech on Monday night, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the
chief of defence staff, warned that Bin Laden's al-Qaida network
remained "a fielded, resourced, dedicated and essentially
autonomous terrorist force, quite capable of atrocity on a
comparable scale" to the September 11 attacks on New York and
Washington.

But, he warned, the temptation to use greater force, with less
constraint and less proportionality, could simply "radicalise"
opinion in the Islamic world in favour of al-Qaida. The enemy was
not just Osama bin Laden. This was not a "hi-tech 21st century
posse in the new Wild West".

But Boyce was echoing what many senior officers in the armed forces
- a breed which traditionally have kept their thoughts to
themselves - have been agonising over, even before September 11.
What is the relationship in military affairs between Britain and
the US, and between Britain and the rest of the world? And, for
that matter, between the military establishment and its political
masters?

While Tony Blair flies around the world promising British
intervention here and there, military commanders feel they are left
to pick up the pieces. While he was raising the prospect of
thousands of British troops handing out bread to starving Afghans,
they were horrified. There was no clear idea of the dangers, or of
the military, and indeed political, implications of such a mission.
Even aid agencies balked at the prospect.

An increasingly politically acute military establishment have
regular contacts at many levels with their counterparts abroad, not
least with increasingly fragile Gulf states. By contrast, they feel
ministers are cocooned by their hosts and told by local British
embassies what diplomats think they want to hear.

Politicians indulge in rhetoric, the military have to consider the
risks, the reality on the ground, or in the souks, as one senior
military officer put it the other day. And it is a myth, propagated
not least by the tabloid press, that military planners are gung-ho,
desperate for ministers to fire the starting gun. Military
commanders now are a cautious breed, as well as being politically
aware.

The international community, says Boyce, must attack the causes,
not the symptoms of terrorism. There must be a battle for "hearts
and minds" - a battle, he suggested, Britain had won in the
communist "emergency" in Malaya in the 1950s, the neo-colonial
conflict against rebels in Oman in the 1960s and, more recently, in
Northern Ireland.

He did not mention the presence of American bases in Saudi Arabia,
or America's failure to apply pressure on Israel to recognise a
Palestinian state - absolutely central issues raised still only in
private by senior officials in the Ministry of Defence and the
Foreign Office, and by senior military figures.

But Boyce did face head-on the question of what was Britain's
national interest. This, he warned, could conflict with that of the
US, our closest ally - certainly America's interest as perceived by
the Bush administration.

Britain, he said, must beware of simply following America's
apparent determination to use its military might in a wider war
against terrorism, a conflict that was certain to "radicalise"
states whose support Britain and other nations needed. Britain will
have to lay down "red lines" beyond which it would not go.

Above all, whatever Britain did must be legal because to do
otherwise would jeopardise its legitimacy. Britain and its allies
must also beware of "exporting terrorism". That, Boyce said
pointedly, had been the experience of the US in Colombia, where
operations against the guerrilla movement, Farc, had forced it into
Mexico and Guatemala.

Britain's military establishment are also well aware of the limits
to what this country can do on its own - hence its genuine
enthusiasm for plans for a EU rapid reaction force, if only the
European allies could get their act together. As Boyce
euphemistically put it, the US - the world's only superpower with
the capability of launching military strikes anywhere in the world
- "has less need of consensus than we do".

There was a presumption, or at least a hope, after the September 11
attacks, that the US would abandon its isolationist tendencies and
engage more constructively with the outside world, notably the
Middle East.

Those hopes have been dashed. The US has effectively blocked all
moves to tighten up the convention aimed at prohibiting the
development of biological warfare. It no longer needs Nato,
treating it merely as a forum to gather as much political, but not
military, support in the search for what Boyce calls "agile
partnerships".

Washington is making it quite plain that after bombing Afghanistan
and toppling the Taliban, it wants to get out of the country as
soon as Mullah Omar and Bin Laden are captured, or presumed dead,
leaving others to clear up the mess.

Britain, said Boyce, was good at "nation building", a mission which
appeals to Blair. But is that the kind of burden-sharing Britain
and its European allies can be satisfied with, while leaving the US
to get on with the bombing? That risks the further alienation of
countries, including so-called "rogue states" with which, according
to the government, it is in Britain's strategic national interest
to engage.

� Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security editor.

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

Bron: The Guardian (UK), 12 december 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4318071,00.html

==========================================================

CLEARING UP AMERICA'S MESS

New evidence of US dealings with the Taliban highlights the role of
oil

Mark Seddon
Tuesday December 18, 2001
The Guardian

Tony Blair continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with America. In
the Middle East, any notion of a separate British interest has been
subordinated to unquestioning support for US actions in
Afghanistan.

The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, suggested recently in the
Commons that British military support might also be offered should
the war against terrorism be extended beyond Afghanistan. Earlier
lofty pronouncements on the rights of the Palestinians have given
way to silence, as Israeli gunships pound Yasser Arafat's
Palestinian Authority out of existence.

So just how far is Britain prepared to go, as the Pentagon eyes
potential new targets in Somalia and Iraq? Now should be the time
to put down a marker against the Washington hawks. Dizzied by the
success of their Northern Alliance friends against the Taliban, the
hawks want to extend military operations - but not to Saudi Arabia,
from where much of the money and the fundamentalism flowed. The
Bush administration's single-minded drive against al-Qaida suggests
that its interest in the long-term welfare of the Afghan people
will disappear with the last B52 bomber. And Tony Blair, who has
been holding out the prospect of a major British involvement in
Afghanistan, is looking isolated.

The Bush administration may also harbour some guilty secrets over
its determination to put America's economic and strategic interests
ahead of tracking down Islamist terrorists - at least before
September 11. In a new book, Bin Laden - the Forbidden Truth, two
French intelligence analysts, Jean Charles Brisard and Guillaume
Dasqui�, claim that the administration initially blocked US secret
service investigations into Islamist terrorism, under the influence
of powerful oil corporations, many of whom had stumped up wads of
cash for the Bush campaign.

Oil interests are heavily represented in the Bush administration.
Aside from the president himself, the vice-president, Dick Cheney,
the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the ministers
for commerce and energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abrahams, have
all worked for US oil companies. Bush's family has a strong oil
background. The corporate giants have not only wanted to keep the
Saudis on side, but had their eyes fixed on the rich oil fields of
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Brisard and Dasqui� describe how weeks before the September 11
attacks, the US administration was bargaining with the Taliban for
the delivery of Bin Laden, in return for aid and political
recognition of a broad-based Afghan government - which would have
included the Taliban. That bargaining process had begun in
February, almost as soon as Bush was sworn in.

John O'Neill, former head of the FBI's counter-terrorism office in
New York, left his job earlier this year complaining that his
investigations into al-Qaida had been obstructed. He allegedly told
the French authors that "the main obstacles to investigating
Islamic terrorism were US corporate oil interests and the role
played by Saudi Arabia".

For their part, the Taliban seem to have taken the US negotiations
sufficiently seriously to appoint a public relations expert, Laila
Helms, niece of Richard Helms, the CIA director during the Vietnam
war. Traffic might have gone both ways. But there can be little
doubt that some in the US administration viewed the Taliban as, in
Brisard and Dasqui�'s words, "a source of stability in central
Asia", not only for their steely grip on the heroin trade, but also
because of the great prize - the oil pipeline that might one day
run from the rich fields in former Soviet central Asia through
Afghanistan to the Indian ocean.

The US government had other ambitions, including a further
weakening of Russia's grip on her old satraps. Sheila Heslin, a
Clinton-era US national security adviser, believed the Afghan
pipeline would "break Russia's monopoly control over the
transportation of oil from that region and promote western energy
security through energy diversification".

But what of Bin Laden? He was originally offered for extradition by
Sudan, but then apparently allowed to head for Afghanistan in 1996
with barely a whimper from the US. Here is the world's most wanted
man, explaining how he acquired his substantial arsenal during the
1980s: "I settled in Pakistan, in the Afghan border region. There
I received volunteers, trained by Pakistani and American officers.
The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the
Saudis".

As the Middle East slips further towards conflagration and
Washington's ultras prepare to extend the war elsewhere, Tony Blair
must explain why our government is so happy to help clear up
America's mess without asking some awkward questions.

� Mark Seddon is editor of Tribune and a member of Labour's
national executive committee

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

Bron: The Guardian (UK), 18 december 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4321860,00.html

========================================================

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN:
THIS WAR REVEALS THE LIMITATIONS OF AMERICAN MILITARY STRATEGY

'Air power works best in conjuction with ground forces - and that
means finding reliable allies'

18 December 2001

As a result of the past couple of months, the Pentagon is now
confident there are few enemies that cannot be battered into
submission through the application of carefully targeted but also
overwhelming air power. They largely accept, after the Kosovo and
Afghanistan experiences, that air power works best when used in
conjunction with ground forces - to oblige the enemy to occupy open
positions, to identify targets and to follow through after the
bombing. Because they are reluctant to put their own troops in
harm's way they need local allies. In this case they were fortunate
in the availability of the Northern Alliance.

As a result the Americans are emerging from yet another major
conflict with few casualties. Of the seven US personnel killed,
more were caught by friendly fire than by the enemy. The Western
media suffered greater losses. Afghan civilian casualties were
substantial but precise numbers are hard to find. Reports from
places such as Kandahar confirm that generally the American bombing
was accurately targeted.although the power of their bombs are such
that, when they do hit the wrong target, the effect is horrendous.

It is almost certainly the case that the combination of the US Air
Force and anti-Taliban warlords, backed by American and British
special forces, meant the fighting was far less bloody than would
otherwise have been the case. This was largely because of satellite
phones, which enabled intense bargaining among the Afghans so that
Taliban commanders felt able to agree to defect or disperse, and
occasionally to surrender. Underestimating the importance of these
deals led so many commentators, including myself, to overestimate
the capacity and readiness of the Taliban to resist.

If the Americans had been acting on their own, not only would they
have taken far longer to get their forces in place for any ground
offensives but, since their cultural disposition is to demand
unconditional surrender, there would have been few deals. In
addition, they did not attract the anti-foreigner sentiment to
themselves: instead it became focused on the al-Qa'ida contingent.

The Americans may have been relieved by the speed of the Taliban
surrender but they did not always appreciate its conditional
quality, and we have yet to see the full impact on efforts to bring
the Taliban and al-Qa'ida leadership to book for their past
misdeeds, let alone on the future governance of the country.

Remarkably few Taliban fighters appear to have been disarmed and
many appear to have drifted back, still armed, to their villages or
into banditry. Despite the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
insistence that members of al-Qa'ida must be captured or killed, a
number seem to have been ransomed and are now out of the country.
When the Americans objected to attempts to organise conditional
deals in the final battle for Tora Bora, in part because they
bought time for those attempting to escape, the obvious answer was:
if you want them so badly, you go and get them.

The heart has certainly been taken out of al-Qa'ida and its
operational capacity severely degraded, if not fully eliminated,
but Washington still needs Osama bin Laden "dead or alive". Mullah
Mohammed Omar also appears to have vanished. It was the failure to
finish off Saddam Hussein that took the shine off George Bush snr's
victory over Iraq in 1991.

Furthermore, whatever the quality of the government being
established in Kabul, the immediate consequence of the war will
have been to localise power and encourage lawlessness. The Pentagon
at times gives the impression that its obligations to any country
ends once it has rooted out the bad guys, but the State Department
appears to understand that the military achievement will be
diminished if a degree of real stability is not now brought to
Afghanistan.

Another reason for not rushing to quick judgements about the
lessons of a particular war is that what works in one set of
circumstances may not work in another. Last week Mr Bush spoke
enthusiastically about the combination of "real-time intelligence,
local allied forces, special forces, and precision air power",
adding that this conflict "has taught us more about the future of
our military than a decade of blue-ribbon panels and think-tank
symposiums".

Yet there are many reasons to question this approach. Your campaign
is only going to be as good as your local allies. They may not
always be available or reliable. If the US does decide to return to
Somalia, it will have to do better with the local warlords than it
did in 1992-3. Evaluations of possible operations against Iraq
depend on whether the Shia and Kurdish oppositions to Saddam's
regime can ever amount to much. If your allies flounder you may end
up without any sensible options, while an excess of enthusiasm may
bring with it guilt through association with massacres and plunder.

A strong presence on the ground is necessary to sustain political
influence and to prevent a country that has been brutalised through
decades of warfare collapsing back into anarchy. Handing over
political influence to whatever group may be prepared to work with
you, an action probably based on opportunism rather than adherence
to Western political norms, may well cause problems for
otherwise-friendly local neighbours. Furthermore, by giving
prominence to their low tolerance of casualties, the American
create an incentive for their enemies to target any forces that are
accessible.

This presents a sharp contrast with the view of the British
Government that properly applied Western armed forces can serve as
a force for good, so long as they are prepared to establish a
robust presence on the ground. Tony Blair's readiness to authorise
British deployments into Kabul almost as soon as the city fell to
the Northern Alliance reflected this belief, and also his view that
unless the West engages fully in the political and economic life of
states such as Afghanistan then they will continue to fail and
continue to cause trouble for the rest of the world.

The Americans may accept that they dare not ignore the more
distressed and tumultuous regions, but they are still disinclined
to volunteer for humanitarian operations and "nation-building".
They prefer to provide funding, occasional diplomatic muscle and
logistical support.

Their dependence on suitable local allies will impose limits on
what the Americans can achieve militarily in the future. It may be
that a sense of limits is no bad for thing for a superpower, and
recognising that somebody's ground troops are needed is at least an
advance on the assumption that air power can achieve all strategic
objectives by itself.

lawrence.freedman@kcl.ac.uk

The author is Professor of War Studies at King's College, London

Bron: The Independent Digital (UK), 18 december 2001
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=11
0600

Weekjournaal Nieuwe Oorlog week 51, 2001

Nederlands / Engels

Duits / Frans