WHY WE MUST WIN
It is now almost five weeks since the bombing began in Afghanistan. No one could pretend that the campaign has yet met with success. Smart bombs have killed innocents. The casualties may be dozens, or they may be hundreds, News bulletins regularly open with the sight of America bombing the poorest country on earth with B-52s, the very machines used in Vietnam. Food aid is dropped, but in the same yellow packaging as cluster bombs. Reports from Afghanistan suggest that, if anything, support for the Taleban has intensified under the aerial assault. A Labour MP has gone to Afghanistan to show solidarity with the bombarded tribesmen. He follows in the footsteps of residents of Luton, Crawley, Bradford, Birmingham and other British towns who have decided to go and fight for the enemy, on the grounds that they have a higher loyalty to Islam than to Britain, the country of their birth and nurture.
We seem no further forward in our plans to capture Kabul. Even Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern town which was to have been an early objective, is apparently beyond our grasp. The 'Northern Alliance' shows no particular inclination to engage the forward gears of its tanks, As Julian Manyon has reported in these pages over the last few weeks, their principal activity seems to be brewing tea. An American helicopter has been downed by the Taleban, killing four. The raid on Mullah Omar's compound in Kandahar, in which 200 airborne Rangers spent half an hour behind enemy lines, turns out to have been a near-disaster. The Taleban returned fire with interest, wounding several US troops. One American general is reported to have said, 'They scared the crap out of everyone.' Washington is intermittently paralysed by panic about anthrax, and in several cases those fears have been justified.
An American general this week appeared before journalists at the Pentagon and announced that the war was going 'according to plan'. What plan? The best hope is that the plan is militarily confidential, and cannot be disclosed for operational reasons. Others are afraid that we are kept in the dark because no one really knows what the plan is. We still have no idea of the
whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, who continues to pepper the Al-Jazeera satellite channel with his home movies, Winter is a matter of weeks away, and it is commonly assumed that operations will become more difficult, if not impossible, with its onset. That is why there is a rising hubbub of alarm. Some left-wing commentators take a gloomy pleasure in what they believe will be a disaster for America. Some right-wing commentators believe that Mr Blair has been wrong in following, so uncritically, the agenda of the Pentagon.
Against this background bleating, it might be useful to restate what this war is about, and what it is not about. This is not a war of retribution. The aim is not to requite the thousands of deaths in New York by killing Afghans. It cannot be said too often: bin Laden and his maniacal followers were trying to maximise loss of life. We are trying to minimise it — hence many of our difficulties. This is not a war against Islam, but against terrorists who espouse a virulent strain of that religion, a fundamentalism that most moderate Arabs themselves regard as a menace. This is not even a war against Afghanistan, but an attempt to topple a vile regime. The Taleban deserve to be expelled simply by virtue of their inhuman behaviour towards women and dissenters.
But that is not why we are bombing Kabul. We are bombing because the Taleban have repeatedly and publicly refused to hand over a man, and his accomplices, responsible for the biggest terrorist massacre since the war. The objectives of the bombing can in fact be articulated quite simply. They are to change the politics of Afghanistan, so that it can no longer provide sanctuary for the al-Oa'eda network. No one has ever suggested that this will be the end of international terror, or bin Ladenisrn. But it is a start. We may not be able to accomplish everything in this war. We may be sweeping under only one corner of the carpet concealing the creepycrawlies of this planet. That does not mean we should not begin.
This bombing does not preclude other action to bring peace to the Middle East. But it is nonsense to suggest, as some have done, that bin Ladenism can only be combated with pre-emptive concessions to the Palestinians. Where is the logic in that? No amount of Israeli suppleness would appease bin Laden and his kind.
Morally and intellectually, there is no difficulty justifying Western action in Afghanistan. There is, however, only one thing finally that justifies a war in the imagination of the public and the media, and that is victory. It is becoming ever more apparent that there is only one way to achieve our ends — kick out the Taleban; rid Afghanistan of al-Oa'eda — and that is to use ground forces. This will require huge courage. It will not be easy. But there is no other way out of Afghanistan. Victory is the only exit.
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