strategic notes on the ongoing war

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

[This is an interesting comment by an opponent of the war against
Afghanistan who seems to have favored the war against Serbia. His comments
on strategic bombing vs. ground troops (toward the end) is especially
interesting.]

No parallel with the Kosovo war

The public isn't wobbling - but it does now sense this campaign won't
defeat al-Qaida

Jonathan Steele
Thursday November 1, 2001
The Guardian [U.K.'

Jack Straw [the British foreign secretary?] calls it the "Kosovo wobble", a
moment of hesitation when the public briefly lost faith in Nato's 1999
bombing of Yugoslavia three weeks after it began. How wrong they were, he
implies, and how right Nato was to ignore them. True, eight weeks after
that wobble, there was still no certainty of victory. On day 78 it suddenly
came. Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, threw in the towel and
agreed to pull his troops out of Kosovo and let international peacekeepers
in. Hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees raced home. The war was
over, its goals achieved.

So the moral for today's war in Afghanistan is clear, we are told. Be
patient.The bombing campaign may seem to have little to show for itself but
the relentless pressure will eventually pay off. Like Milosevic, the
Taliban will one day give up. The comparison with Kosovo may sound
tempting. But in fact it illustrates why the war in Afghanistan was wrongly
conceived from the start, and will go on going wrong. In Kosovo there was a
clear enemy, a Serbian military and police machine which was fighting a
colonial war against a liberation movement representing close to 90% of the
population. Using indiscriminate force, this machine shelled villages,
torched houses and massacred civilians. It was classic ethnic cleansing, in
which Albanians were forced to flee to the hills and later deported from
Kosovo in convoys of tractors and cars or sometimes in sealed trains.

Nato's aims - to get Serb forces out and the deportees back in - were
simple, though there were major problems with the air war. Many who
supported Nato's intervention on the grounds that the cause was just, as I
did, thought the over-reliance on bombing and the targeting of bridges and
power stations posed excessive risks and punished civilians. We advocated a
ground invasion of Kosovo. In the end preparations for one started, and as
General Wesley Clark, Nato's commander at the time, said in London this
week, that decision - along with Milosevic's indictment by the Hague
tribunal and Moscow's warning that it could not defend Belgrade - led to
the Yugoslav president's surrender. Bombing helped, he argued, but it was
only one factor out of four.

Afghanistan is different. The Taliban do not run an all-powerful government
which can order troops to retreat in as clean a way as Milosevic did. The
country has been engulfed in civil war for more than 20 years. Even if the
opposition were to take power in Kabul and Kandahar, pockets of resistance
and warlordism would continue, particularly in the rugged mountains where
Osama bin Laden and his supporters are hiding. So capturing the main cities
will not make the task of finding Bin Laden easier.

But what a cost the effort to bomb the Taliban into defeat is having.
During the Kosovo war it was clear that Albanians were not mainly fleeing
Nato bombing. Television pictures of the daily exodus of deportees
maintained support for Nato's campaign and stopped the "wobble". In
Afghanistan, by contrast, people realise that the bombing is the principal
factor forcing frightened families to leave their homes. Aid agencies
estimate that up to 80% of Kandahar's people have fled. The figure for
Kabul is similar. The fact that many have gone to the safety of (as yet)
unbombed villages rather than towards the closed borders of Pakistan and
Iran may sound comforting. It still represents a wave of misery which puts
unsustainable pressure on already uncertain food supplies.

Clare Short [another British minister] reminds us that three years of
drought have led thousands of Afghans to abandon their homes in search of
food, but she and other ministers are wrong to downplay the extra
dislocation caused by the air war. The Taliban did not cause the drought
and they are not doing the bombing. They run one of the world's ugliest
regimes, but horror over their governance and the suppression of women
should not be confused with the question of aid. Before the bombing started
the Taliban let food convoys through. The main problem was that the outside
world did not respond generously enough to United Nations appeals. Now it
is the bombing, not the Taliban, which does most to make aid delivery
difficult and prompt lorry drivers not to work.

Ministers also argue that the Taliban are wily propagandists whose claims
of casualties cannot be proved. How lucky the allies are. The Taliban's
biggest mistake is not to allow even a dozen journalists to work
permanently in the country. The images of dead and wounded they would
produce, and the genuine assessment of casualty figures they could make
would destroy support for the air campaign. Even without them, a majority
of the British public has come round to wanting a bombing pause. They
rightly sense that this bombing is not going anywhere, and in spite of
advancements in modern weapons' accuracy, too many innocent Afghans will
continue to be killed by error.

To end the "wobble" should Washington and London turn to ground troops, as
was eventually planned in Kosovo? Beware. In Kosovo, Nato ground forces
would have had easily visible targets, the uniformed troops of a
conventional army. Even here one needs to be careful. The contrast between
the relative inaccuracy of bombing and the surgical precision of a soldier
on the ground is a myth. The devastating lethality of hi-tech guns turns
the modern infantryman into a "bomber on legs".

Remember October 1993, when 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia, a
loss which led Bill Clinton to end the whole mission? Surrounded by an
angry crowd, troops of the US Army Rangers and the Delta Force (the same
"special" forces who are supposed to move into Afghanistan to find Bin
Laden) sprayed their machine guns in panic, killing up to 500 Somalis, a
third of them women and children. The only American not killed said after
his release from captivity that the men discarded their rules of engagement
to shoot only at people aiming guns at them. "We fired on anything that
moved," he admitted. His words should haunt us now. In Afghanistan ground
troops would face conditions closer to the Somali scenario than the one
which loomed in Kosovo. Hunting in rural areas, patrolling in suspicious
villages, clambering through shepherds' caves, their carnage of panic could
be horrendous.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence [and my former Congressional
Representative], admitted the other day that Osama bin Laden may never be
found. Although he retracted later, his remark stands as a monument to the
fact that, although truth may be a casualty in war, some truths survive and
take wing. The only effective way to defeat the al-Qaida network, most of
whose operatives are not in Afghanistan anyway, is by intelligent
international police work sustained over several years and backed by
political pressure on states which support them. Trying to oust the Taliban
by force is a sideshow which has turned hundreds of thousands into
refugees, and disrupted aid. Even if, like the war on Milosevic, it were to
succeed after 78 days, al-Qaida would still be at large and fighting on.

j.steele@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine