Nicholas von Hoffman's article in this week's New York Observer has
received the most attention, due to its timing (it reached the newsstands earlier this
week) and because of Andrew Sullivan's implementation of the Von Hoffman Awards
(for "the most prophetically challenged pieces of media war-wisdom so far"). Some
choice bits:
"The war in Afghanistan, the one he should never have declared, has run into trouble.
Just a few weeks into it and it’s obvious that the United States is fighting blind. The
enemy is unknown, and the enemy’s country is terra incognita. We have virtually no one
we can trust who can speak the languages of the people involved. With all our
firepower and our technical assets and our spy satellites, it looks like we don’t know if
we’re coming or going.
[…]
Even with the timid and occasionally treacherous help of the Pakistanis, we are flying in
fog. We go to the right, we go to the left; statements are issued and then modified. It’s
nuts. No sooner had Congress and the President gone to war against Osama bin Laden
than we broadened the fight to include the Taliban. Next there was the talk that the
citizens of Afghanistan, the land of the woebegone and woebegotten, would turn
against their masters, accept Christian baptism and embrace Americanism. Our lunacy
has reached the point of scattering sheets of paper around Taliban installations on
which is printed a picture of firemen raising the American flag with the legend "Freedom
Endures."
We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking. That
our high command could believe the Afghani peasantry or even the Taliban would
change sides after a few weeks of bombing! This is fantasizing in high places. In the
history of aerial bombardment, can you think of a single instance of the bombed
embracing the bombers? Bombing always unites the bombees against the bombers,
and—duh!—guess what the reaction has been in Afghanistan? You don’t need to speak
Urdu to figure it out, which is good since none of us does."
Thanks.