'The US and Britain are wrong to dispense their brand of instant justice in Afghanistan'
25 October 2001
The United States, now the world's only super power, may well manage to batter the ignominious Talibans into submission, and finally to install in Afghanistan the kind of pro-West government the Americans and their allies are so desperate to put into office. They may even manage to run the place by remote control from Washington DC and London, with a government in Kabul taking instructions from America and its allies.
That, however, will not come anywhere near solving the serious image problem which America suffers internationally, but especially in the developing world where it is roundly condemned as a hypocritical country which preaches and practises democracy at home while destabilising other - often poor - countries. For as long as the US continues to be a bully which respects international institutions like the United Nations only insofar as they lend credence to various American actions abroad, the US will continue to have enemies in the developing world.
Lest there be misunderstanding, let me hasten to say that I believe the 11 September attacks on the US were barbarism of the worst kind, indicating the levels of depravity to which human beings are capable of sinking. They were the worst form of terrorism, and both the US and the international community should not rest until those responsible for such vile deeds have been tracked down, prosecuted and put safely behind bars.
However, the US and its ally, Britain, both of which like to be thought of as progressive, democratic countries which respect the rule of law, are wrong to dispense their brand of instant justice in the way they are doing in Afghanistan.
They are wrong to have embarked on the terrible bombing campaign which claims innocent lives and so badly pulverises an already poor country, while those who gave instructions for the 11 September acts of terror are safe in their hideouts.
Once the US and Britain are done with their bombing campaign and installed in Kabul the kind of West-friendly government they want, they will have to ask themselves why it is that the US inspires so much hatred among many in developing countries. Far more constructive than pretending that this pervasive anti-US sentiment does not exist will be to work towards changing that country's negative image.
At the heart of the problem is the duplicitous nature of American foreign policy, which has been responsible for thousands of deaths around the world over the years.
Going back to the years of the Cold War, when the United States still competed with the former Soviet Union for international dominance, America has repeatedly spoken the language of democracy at home while warmly embracing - and working with - tyrants abroad.
In the Philippines and in Haiti, the US supported the dictators Ferdinand Marcos and Jean-Claude Duvalier respectively, against local citizens who were fed up with their dictatorship and wanted democratic rule.
Both President Ronald Reagan and his counterpart in Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, turned a blind eye to apartheid in South Africa and the concomitant murders of the country's blacks by apartheid's police and soldiers. They continued to be close friends with South Africa and to be staunch defenders of its white minority rulers. Instead of voluntarily isolating apartheid South Africa, they continued with Chester Crocker's "constructive engagement" with a country practising a system which had been condemned by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. In the end, US lawmakers - taking their cue from the actions of groups like TransAfrica who mounted daily protests outside the South African Embassy in Washington DC and called for sanctions against Pretoria - passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act against the wishes of President Reagan, whose veto they overrode.
In South America the US, through its support for pro-American rebels like the Contras, culminating in the Contragate scandal which saw Oliver North becoming the fall guy, destabilised many countries. In Africa the US supported and financed numerous dictators over the years, regardless of the fact that they had not been elected democratically, simply because they made the right noises about capitalism and the West.
Both in Africa and in other parts of the world, America armed and financed bandits like Jonas Savimbi to topple governments it did not like. Internationally, the US has tended to be similarly arrogant, always seeking to use its political and economic power to blackmail others. For instance, at times America did not pay its dues to the United Nations because it disagreed with some of the resolutions and decisions of the world body. Yet, when it needs the international community's support for some of its controversial actions, such as the present bombing of Afghanistan, America quickly pays up and becomes a responsible member of the United Nations.
Until six weeks ago the isolationist President George Bush was taking his country out of important international accords like the Kyoto agreement on global warming, and generally telling the world to go and get lost. America, he implied, knew best and did not need the international community – and yet the first thing he did after 11 September was to give the world an ultimatum, saying it was either with the United States or against it in the fight against terrorism.
Those responsible for the 11 September carnage should be hunted down and prosecuted, preferably in a neutral country. However, after destruction of the indigent, innocent people of Afghanistan, the US would do well to seriously review its foreign policy towards the developing world. It is the arrogance and hypocrisy of that policy, after all, which has gained the US so many enemies.
A good starting point might be a strong denunciation of all acts of terrorism in the Middle East but especially those committed by the government of Israel, which has killed up to six Palestinians for every one of its citizens killed, and show an even-handedness in that conflict instead of blind support. For as long as there is no Palestinian state and the US continues to be partisan in the conflict, so long will the US continue to be hated in the developing world.
(The Independent)
Families blown apart, infants dying. The terrible truth of this 'just war'
Richard Lloyd Parry in Quetta
25 October 2001
Sami Ullah was asleep when it happened, and so his friends and neighbours had to tell him about the bomb that struck his house and what it did to him and his family. How the American planes, which had been over earlier in the evening, had returned after everyone went to bed and how, instead of the Taliban base two miles away, they dropped their bombs on a residential area of the town of Tarin Kot.
Mr Ullah's injuries are obvious enough even now - deep cuts caused by the collapsing house and the fragment of something in his belly that might be bomb shrapnel. One of his cousins was also pulled alive from the rubble but no one else was. In the 11 hours between the explosion and the moment when he finally regained consciousness, the bodies of Mr Ullah's wife, his four children, his parents, and five of his brothers and sisters had been lifted from the rubble of their home and buried.
What do you say to a stranger who tells you he has just lost every member of his immediate family? All you can decently do is ask questions.
When did it happen? On Friday night or early Saturday morning. Where? In a suburb of Tarin Kot, capital of the Afghan province of Oruzgan. And why? But Mr Ullah, who is not familiar with the phrase "collateral damage" or "just war" does not have an answer.
In the 19 days of the bombing campaign, many terrible things have been reported but the scenes at the Al-Khidmat Al-Hajeri hospital, where Mr Ullah lay last night, are the most pathetic I have seen. In one ward lay a woman named Dery Gul, about 30 years old, with her 10-year-old daughter, Najimu, and a baby named Hameed Ullah. The little girls have bruised and cut faces; the cheek of the baby is cut neatly in a T shape, as if by a knife. But to understand how lucky they were you only have to look at their mother.
Her face is half-covered with bandages, her arm wrapped in plaster. "The bomb burned her eyes," says the doctor. "The whole right side of her body is burned." The reason Ms Gul is so battered and her daughters so lightly injured, they say, is because she cradled them.
From the Pakistani city of Quetta, where the injured people were carried late on Tuesday, the town of Tarin Kot is just a dot in the middle of the map of Afghanistan, traversed by a single road, surrounded by contour lines. But even if it amounts to no more than a few thousand mud houses with a handful of administrative buildings, it is a provincial capital - an Afghan York or Norwich. Yes, the people in the hospital yesterday said, of course there were Taliban there; but, no, they were miles away from Sami Ullah, Dery Gul, the little girls and their dead relatives.
There had been bombing earlier in the evening, Sami Ullah said, and the military camp had been hit. "There were four bombs that hit the Taliban," he said, "but many more bombs fell on the houses."
While some of the villagers were pulling their neighbours out of the rubble, more bombs had fallen, and more people had been hurt – "about 10 people were injured, and 20 were killed". But the danger appeared to have passed by the time the family went to sleep. If the planes roared overhead, they did not wake them and perhaps those who died - 12 in Sami Ullah's house, eight in the home of the mother and her girls - did not even know what had happened to them.
What then went wrong? The Pentagon has already admitted this week bombing an old people's home in Herat with a simple targeting error. Two weeks ago, bombs killed dozens in the village of Karam where, according to the local people, there had once been an Osama bin Laden camp which had moved years before. Other stories like it suggest that in some cases American intelligence is simply out of date.
But there is a third possibility - that the Taliban are deliberately moving military personnel and equipment close to civilian areas, turning their oblivious inhabitants into de facto human shields.
In another hospital in Quetta yesterday, a nurse told of how nine days ago the Taliban had turned up at her family's house and ordered them to leave. "They said it was for our own safety, because there was a barracks a few hundred metres away," she said.
"But after we had left they moved Taliban soldiers in and stayed there themselves. Afterwards the bombs did fall, and my house was destroyed and the civilian people who stayed behind were hurt too."
"We heard the bombs falling often," said Mr Ullah, as I start to run out of questions, "but we didn't feel afraid because everyone said that American bombs were accurate, and that they would bomb the Talibs, but not the innocent people."
The American broadcasters have a phrase which they repeat in reporting civilian casualties in Afghanistan: "The claims cannot be independently confirmed". And, of course, there is no way to check on anything that the people at the Al-Khidmat Al-Hajeri hospital say.
But if this is all a hoax perpetrated by the Taliban, why does Mr Ullah speak of them with such disdain? And would even the Taliban mutilate a baby to win a political point? I believe that Sami Ullah and Dery Gul and her girls are what they appear – innocent victims of an increasingly cack-handed war, and that there will be many, many more of them before it is close to being over.
COMMENT
This report cannot be independently verified
By Pepe Escobar
ISLAMABAD - "This information cannot be independently verified." This is the new mantra on 24-hour news TV as the Slaughter Show of the world's most miserable by the world's most affluent reaches its third week - with very good ratings indeed.
Shame on CNN and BBC. Shame on Donald "Duck!" Rumsfeld. Fact: Afghan civilians are dying by the hundreds, victims of American bombing. But for Christiane "The Vulture" Amanpour, Father John Simpson, those sparkling, bubbly, fizzy CNN talking heads, and those dour, somber, frozen-cucumber BBC talking heads, "this information cannot be independently verified".
CNN and BBC are now indistinguishable from "Duck!" Rumsfeld. They behave like fundamentalists: with arrogance - in their sense of unquestionable superiority; with certainty - in their iron belief in a set of absolutely universal values; with prejudice - why would they waste their time trying to understand what is profoundly different from themselves? As BBC's Tim "Mr Righteous" Sebastian put it in referring to Pakistan, why should the West cut "shabby little deals with shabby little nations"?
The Rasool family was having breakfast in Kabul when a bomb supposed to hit a military base a mile away struck their house, killing nine members of the extended family and injuring 12. Refugees crossing the Chaman border every day tell of dozens of civilian victims in Kandahar. "Duck!" Rumsfeld would say they are nothing but liars.
Afghan civilians, for CNN and BBC, obviously do not qualify as independent. They are the only eyewitnesses of the carnage inside Afghanistan. But "independently verified" means verified by CNN or the BBC - in their arrogant, barely contained rage at not being there, inside Afghanistan. Every serious journalist now working in Pakistan is obviously on the verge of a nervous breakdown brought on by the impossibility of being in the theater of war. But it is hard enough trying to convince the Taliban that it is in their own interest to open the borders for the global print media - without having to cope with the "You're lying" shrieks of CNN and BBC.
Al Jazeera - the Qatar-based TV station - happens to be inside Afghanistan and as close to the theater of war as possible - but that is too much for the Anglo-American media giants, and Way Too Much for America itself, which does not think twice about censoring "sensitive" Al Jazeera broadcasts. Mohamad Bourini is a reporter covering the war for Al Jazeera from Peshawar. He worked for three years in Afghanistan. He said he was "never censored" by his bosses in Doha, Qatar.
The smart, high-IQ bombs of the Pentagon may not find Osama bin Laden and the evildoers of Al-Qaeda, but they are finding houses a mile away from their targets, UN mine-clearing staff, shepherds and their families, a whole village, a Red Cross compound, a school, a bus, the bazaars of Kandahar, a hospital in Herat. It is a sterling record - but of course this cannot be independently verified. One of these days the Pentagon may even "inadvertently" drop a bomb on Al Jazeera's office in Kabul - and remain mute about it. Or accuse any accusing voice of lying.
As this is an invisible war, and perception is reality, the fact is that the Pentagon can say or not say anything it wants: its barrage of disinformation cannot be independently verified.
So the major public relations lesson is this: if you are rich and poweful and Western, you can bomb whatever you like, the way you like, for as long as you like. And you disclose information - if any - about it the way you like. If you are poor and miserable and Islamic, you shut up and get bombed. Don't make any attempt to say anything about it, because your information cannot be independently verified.
The Greatest Armada in the History of the Universe took four days to secure "aerial supremacy" over a pair of ailing MiGs. Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Taliban supreme military commander, said that not a single leader or commander was killed in two weeks of American ballistic fury. He said the Taliban planes were "safe", and Osama bin Laden was "safe, sound and in good spirits". The Taliban says it downed an American helicopter: but the spare parts shown by the Taliban, says the Pentagon, were made by Bin Laden Enterprises.
So T S Eliot was wrong. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang - but with zillions of whimpers which cannot be independently verified.
(Asia Times Online)
If the cluster bombs don't get you, the mines might
By Mark Baker
The terror began just after midnight. In Shaker Qala, a hamlet on the outskirts of Herat in western Afghanistan, the villagers were awakened by the sound of aircraft. Within moments the bombs began raining down.
Two hours later, when it was over, eight people were dead and dozens wounded. But as the villagers scrambled from their wrecked homes and began bundling the injured onto handcarts to take them to hospital, four kilometres away, they discovered the danger had not passed.
Scattered through the fields and narrow lanes surrounding the village were hundreds of bright yellow canisters the size of soft drink cans that the people had never seen before but thought were landmines.
It was not until the first United Nations mine clearing experts arrived in daylight that the canisters were identified as something far more deadly. The cluster bomb is one of the most lethal weapons in the modern military arsenal. Dropped from high altitude, the main bomb opens above its target, scattering 200 bomblets that drift to the ground beneath small parachutes across an area half a kilometre wide.
Each bomblet packs a deadly triple punch. If it hits a tank or other vehicle it can penetrate armour plating up to 125 millimetres thick before exploding. If it hits the ground, the casing explodes into hundreds of shards of shrapnel, each with the velocity of a bullet, that will kill or maim anyone nearby. If it hits a building a phosphorous core will erupt like a high-tech petrol bomb.
And if it fails to explode on impact each bomblet will lie in wait for unsuspecting victims.
"These people have got a lot to be afraid of," said Dan Kelly, the head of UN mine clearing in Afghanistan. "These bomblets can explode if the villagers so much as touch them. It is a very violent death. You don't get arms and legs blown off like you do with anti-personnel mines: you get killed."
The UN has two Afghan mine clearing teams in Herat, but they are not trained to defuse cluster bombs. Officials in Islamabad have requested urgent technical help from the United States to clear the area around Shaker Qala and identify other areas where cluster bombs may have landed on Tuesday. The use of such lethal weaponry near residential areas illustrates the risk of a rapidly rising civilian toll - and the risk that the US could rapidly lose international sympathy and support - as its campaign in Afghanistan drags on.
UN agencies believe up to 70per cent of Herat's 200,000 people have fled to escape allied bombing raids over the past two weeks. But those fleeing into the countryside and towards the border with Iran face other dangers.
Herat province, particularly near the border, is littered with hundreds of thousands of landmines and unexploded ordnance left by 23 years of civil war.
"This is the most mine impacted country in the world," Mr Kelly said.
In addition to thousands of deaths, landmines have disabled more than 200,000 Afghans in the past 22 years. The UN, which co-ordinates the work of more than a dozen mine clearing agencies, estimated that as many as 50 people a month were being killed before the latest conflict.
With tens of thousands fleeing since the bombing began, landmines may well be the great hidden killer of the war so far.
Bush vs Bin Laden
WASHINGTON, DC--After nearly two weeks of heavy, sustained air strikes, President Bush made final preparations Monday for a full-scale U.S. ground assault against Osama bin Laden, the privileged, formerly hard-partying heir to a family fortune.
"Osama bin Laden is a true emblem of evil, a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans," Bush said. "He cannot, and will not, escape justice."
Bin Laden, son a Saudi construction tycoon worth an estimated $5 billion at the time of his 1968 death, was not cowed by Bush's resolve.
"We will not bow to George W. Bush, the emblem of all that is evil and corrupt about America," said bin Laden, who frequented Beirut nightclubs as a young man, drinking heavily and fighting over women. "This is a man who spent much of his early life defiling God with his immoral ways. He will fall."
"The vile influence of the West must be driven out of the Arab world once and for all," continued bin Laden, who studied English at Oxford University in the '70s and went on to earn a degree in management and economics at King Abdul Aziz University. "And it will, for God is on our side in this righteous and holy war."
Responding to the increasingly incendiary rhetoric of bin Laden, Bush said he plans to escalate air strikes in the next five to six days. The president is also asking Congress for an additional $250 million, roughly the amount bin Laden inherited from his father, for operations in Afghanistan.
"Our military is strong, but it needs our full backing," said Bush, speaking from his 1,600-acre ranch in Crawford, TX. "These air strikes are merely the first step in what will be a long and hard-fought war against terrorism. Each and every one of us must steel ourselves for the difficult road ahead."
According to experts, bin Laden's hatred of America and sense of mission has only come into full focus in recent years. He spent his early adulthood wandering without direction, leaving Saudi Arabia at age 34 for the Sudan, where he ran several family-financed businesses. He then lived briefly in Afghanistan before moving back to Saudi Arabia to join his father's construction company.
His spiritual awakening occurred while working on behalf of his father's construction business to rebuild several mosques in the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina. In 1991, outraged by U.S. troops' presence in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, he turned to an even more extreme strain of Islam.
Bush, who spent his 30s drifting around in what he called his "nomadic" period, gained direction in 1988, when he bought the Texas Rangers with family money and built the team a new stadium in Arlington.
Speaking to the nation Monday night, Bush said the U.S. will not be defeated.
"Our fighting men are strong. They are ready for the task ahead," said Bush, displaying the same resolve he showed when he quit drinking and discovered religion at age 40, turning to his wife's Methodist faith. "We cannot lose, for our cause is just."
America's fighting forces expressed their full support for the president.
"We're gonna go in there and take out bin Laden," said Joseph Barton, a 19-year-old Army reservist from the impoverished rural village of Sissonville, WV. "This one's for W."
Barton then loaded his rifle and prepared to advance on a battalion of 18- and 19-year-old Taliban soldiers in the impoverished rural village of Qalat, Afghanistan.
According to Dr. James Cleary, a professor of political theory at Georgetown University, Bush and bin Laden exemplify how power is attained differently in the West and East.
"In America, power is the domain of the rich and well-connected," Cleary said. "In the Arab world, things are different. Over there, power is the domain of the super-rich and super-well-connected." (The Onion)
A reply to vituperative US critics of stance
By Vincent Browne
A Cathy Fincher wrote to me last week in response to my column of last Wednesday criticising the American bombardment of Afghanistan. She wrote: "Too bad you were not in the World Trade Centre on September 11th at 8.45 a.m." A Mr Nelson also wrote: "I read your article and all I have to say is: go f**k you f***ing queer butt f***ing . . . I hope the US bombs Assolastan until every rag has been killed . . . Hope you get AIDS f***er".
There were tens of other such responses, in all 339 e-mails, almost entirely from the United States from people who had read the column on the Yahoo.com website, where it was posted. The response was overwhelming vituperation offering an insight into part of the mind of America at this time. Of the 339 responses only about 30 were supportive of the views expressed.
The column had concluded: "The bare reality now is Afghanistan is being devastated and hundreds are being slaughtered on the net issue of bringing bin Laden and his associates to justice in America rather than in an agreed third country". On reflection, I think I understated the point. The victims of the bombardment of Afghanistan are not just those slaughtered by the bombardment - there are also the thousands who will die and are dying as a direct result of the halt to food aid caused by the bombing.
I asked what was the point of the exercise since, it seems obvious, the terrorism that caused the abominations of September 11th were planned and executed far away from Afghanistan (for instance in Germany and Florida) and, possibly, had no link with Afghanistan.
A Mr Foley wrote: "True, we are ravaging their country (Afghanistan). I'd personally like to see them enslaved for the rest of their lives." A Mr Wiberg wrote: "You deserve to live as a Taliban woman". "We'll be waiting to dispatch you to whatever afterlife you believe in" (a Mr Stifflemire). "This is what us Americans like to call 'payback'. Come on the militant Muslim that killed 5,000 of our citizens. By the way, Iran, Iraq, Syria, you next" (Mr Carter). "Your paucity of critical thought, madam (for surely you are a woman) is exceeded only by your moral obtuseness. On the other hand I am forced to concede that you Irish know a thing or two about terrorism" (Perry, North Carolina). "So the Dublin Times sympathises with the Afghan terrorists - probably because they also support the IRA and sympathise with terrorism." (R371@aol.com).
"Before spouting off about the US and their policies abroad, maybe you should clean up your own back yard with the IRA's impressive record over the decades in murdering people" (Alachua@hitmail.com). "You f*** with the US and you will pay" (Mr Kotz). "We should take your ass out to Afghanistan and let them kick the shit out of you for your liberal beliefs" (Mr Chavarria). "Right or wrong, America will continue to bomb whoever they chose and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. Just as it should be" (Mr Larson). "You make me ashamed of my Irish heritage" (Mr Monaghan).
Many of the responses were thoughtful. Some made the point that what else was there to do but take action against the organisation in Afghanistan that is known to have been responsible for the September 11th atrocity and against the Taliban regime that was harbouring them? The suggestion that bin Laden could have been extradited to a third country was ludicrous - the Taliban would have agreed to extradite him only to a country where he would have been treated sympathetically. The US response was measured - if it had wanted to, it could have used far greater military force but it had forsaken that to protect innocent lives. What was the evidence of "hundreds" of civilians being slaughtered other than the discredited word of the Taliban? The suggestion that there was moral equivalence between what the terrorists did on September 11th and what George Bush and Tony Blair are now doing was monstrous.
A brief reply to these responses.
What should the US have done? It should have avoided violence and the inevitable killing of innocent civilians at least until negotiation had failed. It did not exhaust negotiation on the extradition of bin Laden et al, indeed it did not negotiate at all. Second, it should use (and no doubt is using) its vast investigatory powers (the FBI and CIA) to identify those behind the bombings as it did following the Lockerbie bomb and the previous attack on the World Trade Centre. Thereby, it might be able to cope with the real threat of terrorism emanating from within western societies. It should seek to quieten the rage of much of the Islamic world by sponsoring a fair settlement in Israel, withdrawing its forces from Saudi Arabia and ending the sanctions on Iraq.
The bombardment of a country is not measured. We know from the assaults on Yugoslavia and Iraq and the previous attack indeed on Afghanistan that the claims of the precision of "surgical strikes" are false. Indeed, on CBS news on Monday evening last, viewers could see for themselves American planes bombing their allies (Northern Alliance troops) instead of Taliban, and this occurred in broad daylight. Bombing involves the infliction of terror and slaughter on innocent people and that is an abomination. Those responsible for such abominations deserve to be called terrorists for they knowingly inflict terror on innocent people.
But as I have suggested above, it is worse than that. Bombing Afghanistan at a time when it is known that millions of people are on the verge of starvation is itself a heinous act. (The Irish Times)
An Eye on the Other Half of the Battle
By Jim Hoagland
Wednesday, October 24, 2001; Page A25
UNITED NATIONS -- Each U.S. bomb that hits an Afghan airfield is counted a military success at the Pentagon. But in the 38th-floor office of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, that bomb is marked down as a future problem.
"These are the same airfields that would be used by the United Nations for flying in humanitarian supplies to the Afghan population," Annan said in an extended discussion here yesterday. "How quickly the airfields can be repaired will be a factor in our ability to keep people from starving. With so many lives at risk, we have to think now about what comes next."
The American road out of quagmire in Central Asia ultimately passes through the United Nations. President Bush acknowledged this reality by declaring support for a U.N. role in Afghanistan's post-conflict reconstruction. Congress did the same by paying arrears on U.S. dues in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
But as the U.S. military campaign broadens its path of destruction on the ground, U.S. political strategy seems to be bogging down in the tribal politics and the regional struggle for influence by Afghanistan's neighbors that have doomed previous efforts to bring peace to a shattered nation. A capabilities gap is emerging between America's separate military and diplomatic campaigns.
The battlefield strategy seems to be developed at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa with relatively little Washington input. It is as blunt and clear as a checklist. U.S. political strategy comes out of the State Department, which has embarked on complex and to some extent contradictory efforts to assemble an international coalition to support the U.S. war effort and an internal tribal coalition to replace the Taliban.
Annan, who won the Nobel Peace Prize this month, is too diplomatic to discuss publicly any misgivings he might have about a U.S. strategy gap. His steady hand and comprehension of U.S. goals were important factors in the two Security Council resolutions of support that underpin the opening phase of the American military campaign in Afghanistan. But his general concerns about what comes next are evident in his words:
"To be able to play the proper humanitarian and administrative roles, we need to have a clear appreciation of U.S. military objectives, of what will happen politically when those objectives are achieved and in what time frame they are likely be achieved," Annan said. "We need to know what U.S. expectations are about the role of neighboring countries as well. Unless they are all really on board, it will be extremely difficult to maintain" stability in Afghanistan.
"We all know how intensely independent Afghans are, and the difficulties foreigners have faced in imposing their will on them," he added.
Other senior U.N. officials are more blunt in private comments. They point out that Annan has told Washington that it would take three to five months to organize a U.N. peacekeeping force and administration, which the secretary general feels would be ill-suited for Afghanistan in any event. Instead, the U.N. hierarchy favors "the Afghan option."
The hope is that out of this conflict will emerge a new pattern of cooperation among -- or at least noninterference by -- Pakistan, Iran, India and Afghanistan's other neighbors. This could permit a highly decentralized Afghan regime to replace the Taliban and organize its own security force.
"Local leaders and military officers who have been sidelined in the past decade could emerge and, with behind-the-scenes technical help from us, form a new administration there," said one official here. "But that can happen only if the neighbors, and particularly Pakistan and Iran, can be persuaded to set aside their own ambitions inside Afghanistan."
This sounds like wishful thinking to U.S. officials, who envision a multinational peacekeeping force and a new tribal coalition that protects Pakistan's interests. This seems as problematic to me as the U.N. approach, which has the advantage of pushing new thinking on Washington.
By emphasizing its concern for Pakistan's tribal loyalties in its quest to secure bases there, the United States remains mired in a strategic past that Bush says Sept. 11 changed forever. U.S. policy should aim at using this crisis to establish stable new working relationships with Iran, India and Russia. This should not threaten Pakistan's independence, merely its unhealthy hegemony over Afghan politics.
Reversing alliances is never easy. It will require new thinking and significant change in three countries that have been U.S. foes in the recent past but are now at a crossroads themselves. All the more reason to get started now with a U.S. agenda of strategic change.