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Posted on 11/04/2001 4:06:06 PM PST by vannrox

WHAT a difference geography can make. In London, America's war on Afghanistan has been described as "the slaughter of the world's poorest by the world's richest". A growing chorus of critics agree that the bombardment is too harsh, too dangerous to civilians - that after a mere three weeks, it has already expanded out of all proportion.


In Afghanistan, America's war on Afghanistan looks rather different. After the Soviet bombing raids of the 1980s, the Mujahideen would scour the deep craters for emeralds, blown out of the rock by the constant force of the blasts. To people accustomed to that sort of attack, America's precision bombing seemed laughably survivable. "All you have to do is move next door," is how one Taliban soldier happily described it. Equally, their opponents, the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, have been mystified by a perceived lack of seriousness by the US air force.


But even by other standards, the American bombing campaign has been extraordinarily light. America's B-52s - the planes which drop cluster bombs - have flown some 40 missions in four days. During the Gulf War, they flew nearly 1,600 sorties in two days. The US strategy to date is not an attempt to destroy the Taliban with a harsh bombing campaign of disproportionate strength and violence.


But if we are not trying to bomb the Taliban into oblivion, what are we trying to achieve in Afghanistan? This isn't an easy question to answer, because not everyone in the Bush administration would respond in the same way. Put crudely, the administration's more warlike members, led by Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, have from the beginning argued that the US should try to defeat the Taliban quickly, mostly by working closely with the Northern Alliance. The capture or killing of Osama bin Laden, they reckoned, would then come about in due course. The diplomats, led by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, are more concerned with maintaining the support of the coalition in general, and of the Pakistanis - who loathe the Northern Alliance - in particular. The diplomats also believe the war should have more limited objectives, that killing or capturing bin Laden ought to be enough to bring it to a halt.


Both arguments have their merits. Unfortunately, the conflict between them has meant that neither strategy has been pursued to its logical conclusion. Instead, as one Defence Department official puts it, the US military simply "did what we were trained to do". Although the pilots were trying to "smoke out" bin Laden and the Taliban leadership, there was nothing especially novel about the means they deployed. The US air force simply played by its old Iraq and Serbia rule book, hitting everything that could be construed as a military installation: aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles, as well as the clusters of huts and landing strips that pass for military bases. There weren't many such targets: hence the relatively light bombing.


Hence, also, the widespread discomfort with the progress of a war which has, almost without warning, suddenly reached a turning point. In the past week, Mr Rumsfeld has defended himself against the charge that "people are saying" the war is going badly. Articles with headlines such as "Is the US losing the battle?" have begun to appear in the US press. Objectively speaking, the war isn't going badly: the Americans are hitting most of their targets and haven't lost a pilot. But even the most uninterested members of the public can sense the lack of an end game. And no wonder: with the principal leaders battling among themselves, there hasn't been one.


A change is now coming, one with enormous implications for the West. Suddenly, journalists based in the Panjshir Valley are hearing the rumble of cluster bombs, a sure sign that the United States is finally bombing Taliban front lines, in preparation for a Northern Alliance attack. American and Northern Alliance commanders have made contact at the highest level, and are at least meeting regularly to agree on targets. In other words, Donald Rumsfeld's warlike party is winning the day - by default.


After three weeks of cautious bombing, we haven't found bin Laden and we didn't force the Taliban leaders to defect or make mistakes. Although the US is trying to organise a broader opposition in the southern, Pashtun regions of the country, it hasn't worked yet. Now, there simply isn't another strategy in Afghanistan: either we fight alongside the Northern Alliance, or we don't fight at all.


There are reasons to be pleased by this. It isn't a step in the dark: many of the Northern Alliance's leaders are well known in the West, and a few have track records in power. They aren't fanatics. When the Northern Alliance leader Ishmael Khan ruled Herat, girls went to school. When the Taliban took over, the girls were sent home. By making closer contact with him and others, the United States will also liberate itself from its dependence on the ISI, the Pakistani secret service which helped invent and suppported the Taliban. It was they who probably betrayed Adbul Haq, the Northern Alliance's envoy last week. During the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, the ISI talked the US out of throwing its full support behind the late Ahmed Shah Masoud, the charismatic Tajik leader who became the Northern Alliance's chief commander. Unfortunately, the ISI has been our main source of information about Afghanistan ever since.


There are also reasons to worry. As I say, the Pakistanis have been opposing the Northern Alliance for the past decade, not least by funding the Taliban, and may stop supporting the war if they feel the Alliance is getting too much support. Nor are the Northern Alliance ideal allies: they are badly equipped, few in number, and sorely missing Masoud. Some Northern Alliance factions have been accused of theft, drug-dealing, and rape. After two decades of war, no one in Afghanistan has clean hands.


More importantly, the war is now going to get heavier, bloodier, nastier. Cluster bombs are directed at troops - live people - not airstrips. A Northern Alliance "push" towards Kabul or Mazar-i-Sharif will mean real battles, over inhabited territory, with civilian casualties inflicted by soldiers, not bombs. The war's fastidious critics haven't liked what they've seen so far. It will be interesting to see how will they react when the fighting actually starts.

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