WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 21 2001
SIMON JENKINSAmerican policy in Afghanistan I can understand. It has been consistent. Since the atrocity on September 11, it has been to get the man who did it and kill him. Any means are justified by this end. Do not debate evidence or justice or morals or proportionality or consequence. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Keep it simple. Find Osama bin Laden and kill him.
The policy has worked. To the amazement of everyone except those who knew them, the Taleban were vulnerable to their old foes, the northern warlords. They were brushed aside after the latter were re-equipped by the Russians and given American tactical air support. With the Northern Alliance roaming the country, American units can now search out bin Laden, their planes apparently bombing “hostile” villages at will. President Bush this week authorised “secret military tribunals” to execute terrorists overseas without due process of law. Enough said.
Once bin Laden is dead, America will leave Afghanistan to its fate. That is already clear. The Pentagon’s ruling guru, Paul Wolfowitz, has often pointed out that “one of the lessons of Afghan history is . . . if you go in, don’t stay too long because they don’t tend to like foreigners”. America wants no airy-fairy nonsense about United Nations peacekeepers or stabilisation forces or broad-based coalitions. It wants out. Having almost achieved its goal, the Pentagon does not care which bunch of murderers runs Afghanistan and is disinclined to prop up some puppet regime to appease the guilt of British liberals. It knows that sending American troops into Asian quagmires is stupid. It was American troops in Saudi Arabia that gave bin Laden his break.
So far, so clear. British policy, on the other hand, is all over the shop. At first it was simple, to get bin Laden by diplomatic means. It was to squeeze the Taleban until bin Laden popped, by cutting off their money from Saudi Arabia and applying extreme pressure from the Saudis, Iran and Pakistan. At the risk of repeating myself and British ministers in early September, the policy was to cut the Taleban’s external cash and put a price on bin Laden’s head. He and his Arabs were already “unwelcome guests” to the Pashtuns. Pay enough in bribes and the warlords would do for bin Laden what he did for the Northern Alliance commander, Ahmed Shah Masood. His fall would soon topple the Taleban leadership as well, since they drew money from the same well. The policy needed only Pakistan and the Saudis to play ball.
In the flurry of briefings and counter-briefings over the past two months, I have heard this message over and again, summed up by a former Afghan Foreign Minister in Whitehall last week. He said simply: “The policy was sound. It would have taken two months.” In the days after September 11, it was being implemented with overwhelming regional support. Kabul and Kandahar were crawling with spies. The Taleban were starting to split.
The so-called regional option was shattered by the Americans before it was tried. Domestic pressure on Washington to stage a high-profile retaliation was too strong. The bombers knocked out Taleban air power, for what that was worth. They then picked “psychological” targets, roads, bridges, barracks, houses and villages. This was probably counter-productive since killing civilians boosted regional support for the Taleban and made a hero of bin Laden. Then the B52s went in, against Pakistani and State Department pleading, to support a Northern Alliance advance across open country to Kabul. In conditions classically suited to close air support, the B52s proved starkly effective.
From the moment the Pentagon “ultras” won the argument, Britain offered unconditional support. Downing Street’s tabloid bombardiers became “gung-holier than thou”. One-time CND supporters found themselves defending the use of anti-personnel munitions on urban targets. They glorified America’s unsavoury allies as “our boys”. They mobilised a hysterical “abuse offensive” against anyone who disagreed with them.
Britain this past month has behaved like the classic timid sidekick. It constantly implied to the press that it would send ground troops “in two or three days’’. It sheltered behind the Pentagon’s skirts, dashing out and shouting Ya Boo! at the bogeyman before dashing back. Now it has dashed too far. It has sent 120 Royal Marines to sit in Bagram airbase, with 6,000 more troops poised to follow. The Americans are laughing. They are happy to have Tajiks running Kabul.
Any UN attempt to evict them now will surely require a fierce battle and it is not one that the Americans will fight. There were even rumours yesterday that there were Tajik demands for the British to leave Bagram.
Tony Blair declared in his Brighton speech last month that he “would not walk away from Afghanistan”. It was his quid pro quo for bombing it. He pledged that Britain would restore stability to that country and rebuild its political life “with all groups represented”. It sounded great but he forget to ask if Big Boy agreed. Big Boy does not agree.
The two transatlantic allies are now glaringly at odds. Mr Blair has his troops exposed on foreign soil, surrounded by hostile tribesmen like Gordon at Khartoum, but he dare not send reinforcements. America has thousands of soldiers in Uzbekistan, whom the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has no intention of putting in harm’s way. Mr Blair’s policy may be consistent with his desire to set the world to rights, but Mr Bush’s policy is consistent with his isolationism.
Uncle Sam wants his eye-for-an-eye, and perhaps a tooth as well. That is all.
The war on terrorism in Afghanistan may seem to have passed to the United Nations, but it has not. It has passed to Abdul Rashid Dostum outside Konduz, to Ismail Khan in Herat, to President Rabbani in Kabul, to bin Laden’s old friend, Haji Qadir, in Jalalabad, and possibly soon to Mullah Naquib in Kandahar. These are the same merchants of mayhem whose factionalism let in the Taleban in 1996. America last month allied its thirst for revenge to that of the Russians against the Pashtuns and the Tajiks against the killers of Masood. But that is no more than a replay of the Great Game. Vengeance does not deter terror, it merely feasts on its own offspring.
Without American support, I assume that British troops will have to withdraw if and when bin Laden and Mullah Omar are dead. It is unimaginable that other nations will send troops to separate warring factions where Americans fear to tread. Aid will be left to the private, non-government sector. The Blairs will, I hope, sponsor fashionable concerts for the innocent Afghan victims of American bombing.
America’s reinstatement of the pre-Taleban warlords was deliberate policy. Why else were none of its troops with the advancing Tajiks, to ensure their pledge to stay out of Kabul? There were planes overhead. The reason was that the best way of finding bin Laden was to use as mercenaries those who most wanted him dead. The northern warlords, with their opium trade and their tribal massacres, are said to be kinder rulers than the Taleban. That may be the case. But I stick to my view that Afghan politics is not my business, unless it yields another bin Laden. The manner in which he is now being sought threatens to do just that.
Had this been handled not by war but by bribery, cajolery and financial strangulation, nobody can tell if bin Laden would now be dead and the Taleban on the run. Those whose opinion I trust believe so. Nor can we know if a moderate Pashtun coalition with widespread regional sponsorship might be ruling a more stable Kabul. All we know is that today more destruction has been wreaked on the wretched Afghans, more have been killed and we have restored the same unstable status quo that reigned before the Taleban arrived.
The West has no stomach for another war to impose a UN prefecture on Afghanistan. The Americans can therefore claim that there is no alternative to their policy of getting out as fast as possible. Send in humanitarian aid. But let Afghanistan heal its own wounds. Let it find its own path to salvation. If it spawns another bin Laden, the West can always go back and bomb it again.
