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Behind the Headlines
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
November 12, 2001
THE
WAR IS A TRAP
We've taken the bait
Two
months into the war, and the Americans were hard-pressed to point
to a single
success, never mind the proverbial light at the end of the
tunnel. The argument
that the Afghan war is a quagmire waiting to swallow them seemed
more credible
than ever, and significant voices of dissent were beginning to be
raised,
in Europe if not quite yet in America. Then, suddenly, a
"victory" –
the Northern Alliance, our foot-soldiers on the ground, scored a
major success
with the taking of Mazar-i-Sharif, and our laptop bombardiers
exulted:
On to Kabul! Ah, but not
so fast…
'TOTAL MAYHEM'
President
Bush was quick to announce that "We will encourage our friends to head south,
but not into the city of Kabul itself." Oh? And why not? the media wanted
to know. Bush was vague on this point, but his guest, Pakistan's President
Pervez Musharraf, was more forthcoming, bluntly stating that the last time
these guys took Kabul – from the Soviets – they carried out "total
atrocities," and "mayhem" was the order of the day: "And I think if the northern
alliance enters Kabul we'll see the same kind of atrocities being perpetuated
against the people there." He might well have added: and, just like last time,
Pakistan will have to deal with half a million refugees, as Afghans fleeing
their "liberators" pour over the border in an unstoppable human wave.
NO
CUDDLING
The
American reluctance to cuddle up to the Northern Alliance is justified on
a number of levels. To begin with, Musharraf is right about their thuggish
proclivities: Human
Rights Watch has detailed their sorry record on this score. After all,
the very success of the Taliban in overthrowing them to begin with was due,
in large part, to the Northerners' brutal campaign of pillage, rapine, and
mass murder, which did not exactly endear them to their subjects. The Taliban,
for all their ferocity, seemed like they might be an improvement over the
Alliance: at least the violence of the former was predictable and focused
on implementing some concept of law, even if it meant an absurdly extreme
interpretation of the Sharia, or Islamic law. The violence of the Northern
Alliance was – and is – utterly lawless. Just on moral grounds alone,
they are insupportable (unless, of course, you're Bill Kristol or Richard Perle,
in which case the horrific human rights record of our unsavory Afghan
allies is just another way to show how tough-minded we are).
THE
AFGHAN SNAKE PIT
On
practical grounds, however, the Northerners are even less attractive as a
potential proxy force for the US. To begin with, the ethnic make-up of this
tenuous Alliance makes its victory highly unlikely: for it is an alliance
of three minorities which, taken together, add up to barely 50 percent of
the population. Tajik supporters of (Tajik) President Burhanuddin Rabbani
and Uzbeks of the Junbish-I-Milli party, have joined together with
the Shi'ite Muslim Hazara of the Hezb-i-Wahdat against their common
enemy of the moment. Riven by intense rivalries, these disparate and fully
autonomous groupings have continually fought one another over the years, and
could turn on one another at a moment's notice. And then there is the problem
of the lack of military leadership….
A
DEAD END
Nominally
headed by President Rabbani, the Northern Alliance was up until September
dominated by its military leader, the Tajik Commander Ahmed Shah Masood. Masood's
untimely assassination at the hands of Bin Ladenite agents threw the leadership
into the hands of a very dicey character, even by Afghan standards,
Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum. In the 1980s, Dostum joined with Soviet puppet
President Najibullah in fighting the anti-Communist insurgents: when
the rebels took Kabul he decided to go with a winner and abruptly switched
sides. The Taliban regime sent him fleeing northward, where he established
his own fiefdom headquartered in Mazar-i-Sharif; although he was being aided
by Russia, India, and Iran, Dostum couldn't hold on even to that, and was
soon driven out of the country. He took refuge in Turkey, and, on his return,
once again joined up with the Northern Alliance: the Uzbek commander is the
logical successor to Masood – except that, politically, his pro-Communist
record makes him political poison and isolates the anti-Taliban opposition
even more. So the irony is that, even as they rack up military victories,
the Northern Alliance – with the support of a rapidly shrinking sector
of the population – is a strategic dead-end, and the Bush administration knows it.
WAR
BY PROXY
The
success of the proxy force strategy rests on the task of somehow appealing
to the Pashtun majority in the central and southern regions of the country,
including the area around Kabul, but there is little chance of that at the
present juncture. The only other contender for Pashtun loyalties who might
be enticed into the ranks of the Alliance is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, onetime
leader of the Islamic Party, known as the Butcher of Kabul: his siege of that
city in 1992 resulted in 20,000 civilian deaths. Not many
relish the thought of Hekmatyar's return. In any case, he
has just announced that he might indeed return – to fight at the side
of the Taliban.
INTO
THE QUAGMIRE
As
we get bogged down in the details of which tribe should get which ministerial
post in a postwar government, the distance from the original cause of the
war grows until the connection between the two is so tenuous as to be nonexistent
(or, at least, deniable). Only the other day, US combat commander Tommy Franks
did indeed deny it, declaring that the targeting of Bin Laden – "dead
or alive," as Bush put it – is
not the goal of the US military mission. But then, what is the
goal? The overthrow of the Taliban? The restoration of the Afghan monarchy?
The "liberation" of Afghan women? The implantation of democracy in the most
inhospitable soil imaginable? The conquest of Afghanistan by US troops and
the creation of a giant Bosnia in the midst of Central Asia? As the original
justification for the war gets lost in a welter of political and military
maneuvers, any and all of the above will tend to fill the vacuum – and
we will have fallen into the very clever trap Bin Laden has laid for us.
THE
IMPOSSIBILITY OF DEFEAT
The
bombing of the Beirut barracks, in which 241 American soldiers were killed,
and the assaults on the Khobar military outpost in Saudi Arabia, must surely
serve as a warning to American policymakers who might otherwise not hesitate
to establish a US military presence in Afghanistan – or anywhere in the
region. Our own bases on the Saudi peninsula are precarious and exposed enough
as it is, without setting ourselves up for an even larger-scale potential
disaster. If the logistics don't defeat us, the weather and the Afghans'
well-earned
reputation for being fiercely resistant to foreign invaders will – and
this is one instance where a defeat is out of the question, as far as the
Bushies are concerned.
THE
POLITICS OF ESCALATION
As
usual, our warmongering punditocracy, insulated by ignorance and motivated
by sheer bloodlust, is clamoring for Bush to "unleash" the Northern Alliance
and biting at his heels about the likelihood of sending in US ground troops.
Their darling, Senator John McCain, is palavering about the alleged necessity
of this course, and this chorus, together with the "on to Baghdad" crowd,
is howling for escalation. The Bushies, for their part, seem torn, caught
between the Powellian strategy of using both military and political pressure
to split the Taliban and get at Al Qaeda, and the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz school
of steady escalation. Clearly, the administration realizes that the "northern
strategy" of using the Alliance as a proxy force would unite most Afghans
against the foreign invaders. What they aim to do is to isolate Bin Laden,
both politically and militarily, casting Al Qaeda in the role of the foreign
invasion force. It is a tricky maneuver which may be impossible for the President
and his Secretary of State to pull off, not so much due to resistance on the
part of the Taliban, but because of political pressure on the home front.
The McCainiacs and their neocon handlers are pushing for an American Jihad,
fought by American troops, on the ground in Afghanistan, and if the Powell
strategy doesn't bear fruit before the onset of winter the momentum for escalation
may be unstoppable.
AN
ASTUTE ANALYSIS
I
was struck by something
the writer Tariq Ali said to an interviewer, in answer to a typically
leftoid question:
Q.:
"What would you say is at stake in this war? What is the center of the dispute:
access to gas and water in the Middle East, establishment of hegemony in the
Islamic world, assuring a permanent U.S. presence in the region, or none of
the above?"
Tariq
Ali: "I really don't believe that this war was begun for economic gain. We,
on the left, are always quick to look for the economic reasons and usually
we're right, but not this time. I think the war was basically a response to
domestic pressure after the events of September 11. There were choices to
be made. The US could have decided to treat this for what it was: a criminal act
and not an act of war. They chose war. Obviously they will use it to strengthen
and assert US global hegemony on all three fronts: political, military and
economic, but first they have to get out of the situation they're in."
The
situation, I might add, we are all in. It is a very astute analysis,
one that avoids America-bashing and Bush-bashing while identifying the tragic
dilemma faced by this administration. Although he doesn't quite say it, Ali
clearly sees that Bush is right on one major point: we didn't start this war.
We didn't choose this battle, it has been chosen for us. But how we fight
it is vital to the question of whether we succeed or not, or else create a
worse disaster.
AT
WHAT PRICE?
And
here we stumble on real reason for this war: the need to appease domestic
opinion, to appear to be doing something – anything! – as long as
it looks and feels decisive. Furthermore, our leaders, of course, are
only human: they, too, have emotional reactions, which often overshadow the
national interest. Vengeance on behalf of the victims of 9/11 is emotionally
satisfying – but the question is, what price will we pay for that satisfaction?
VENGEANCE
VERSUS THE NATIONAL INTEREST
The
US national interest is in no way served by the destabilization of Pakistan,
and the news in this regard is hardly comforting: the latest is that Islamabad
is relocating its nuclear weapons out of the country. Kashmir is about to
explode, and this could trigger a nuclear exchange with Pakistan's arch-rival,
India. Across the Muslim world, the "street" is roiling and ready to explode
in a paroxysm of rage, bringing down pro-Western governments from Cairo to
Riyadh, threatening even Turkey. Such a pan-Muslim uprising would throw the
world economy into chaos, with the West's access to oil blocked: our recession
could well turn into a worldwide depression.
GOD
HELP AMERICA
A
war fought against this ominous backdrop would soon take on the character
of a global cataclysm. The most farseeing advisors to the President surely
see this: God help us if they fail to convince Bush. For in that case, we
are all screwed, and nothing short of a miracle can save us.
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