Haffalump...you must have read the link to the independent newspaper I provided yesterday on the other taliban thread! (the one of doom...) for the similarities our remarkable!
I'll put it in full: Quoting! This was in yesterdays independent newspaper...
Anne McElvoy: So what have the anti-war protesters got to say now?
'I've known minor roadworks that took longer to complete than the fall of Kabul'
14 November 2001
Terrible news from the front: we're winning the war. The capture of Mazar and Kabul is deeply depressing. If the Taliban are depressed, think how much worse it is for the anti-war lobby in the West. How can something that was supposed to go so wrong go so right?
The nature of the anti-war case has taken several contradictory directions to date and events in Afghanistan must surely provoke it to take a new and interesting one. Let's remind ourselves of the thwarted certainties so far. First they told us that America would "lash out" blindly. George Bush inconveniently refused to oblige this stereotype by stopping to do a bit of military planning and delaying a response to give the Taliban time to yield Osama bin Laden a rather reasonable offer in the circumstances.
They then began to fret about the evidence against Mr bin Laden. Where's the proof that he was behind the 11 September atrocities? He had only tried to blow up the World Trade Centre once before and bombed two American embassies in Africa. People who argued this were unlikely to believe any standard of proof intelligence services could offer. So what they were really saying was that there could be no proof short of Mr bin Laden's confession.
But hold on a minute: here comes news of the latest bout of bin video karaoke. In it, Mr bin Laden says: "If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents and this is legal religiously and logically."
As the terrorist-in-chief has never seemed unduly keen to disclaim responsibility, it seemed extraordinarily benign of the "give Osama a chance" crowd here in the West to be so concerned on his behalf. At least he has come out and told it straight about his actions. It's the weasling counter-factuals of the oppositionalists that are more troubling.
Maybe they don't quite understand someone who thinks it's fine to slaughter innocents legally, religiously and morally. Maybe they think that a change in the way the West runs economic and development policies would have made all the difference.
I really do gawp at this one. Do we need to reform world trade? You bet. Do we need to strip away the choosy protectionism of the US and the agricultural closed shop of the EU to help poorer countries sell their produce? Urgently, we do. Should we care about the injustices and poverty in the world and go on looking for better ways to address them? Of course.
Would any of this have made the slightest difference to Osama bin Laden? You must be kidding. This notion that a spoilt child of a festering Saudi regime fleeing into the maw of annihilation has anything to do with a progressive desire to improve the planet is a one-way ticket to the moral mire.
The anti-war case is as flawed practically as it is ethically. The bombing, we have been warned, would "never work" and would only succeed in strengthening the Taliban's support in the population. The events of the past two days do not look like a decisive swing to the Taliban to me.
We were warned that this would be America's Vietnam along with all the other "America's Vietnams" that have failed to materialise since the last one. The West would get bogged down in a ground war, the bombing campaign was "getting nowhere".
The first time this objection was raised to me was six days after it began and every week thereafter. How fast a war is good enough? I understand the logic of people who say that it's wrong to fight at all although don't think they can escape the charge of complicity in evil if they take this route. But I'm genuinely perplexed by those who keep saying it wasn't working when it had just started. I've known minor roadworks that took longer to complete than the fall of Kabul.
Bombing is horrible. It should be targeted and used to gain the maximum strategic advance in the shortest possible time. Surely the anti-war party must admit that this is precisely what it has done. If you want these things over quickly and as humanely as possible, that is the best way to go about it.
Let me guess what the new spate of objections will now be. The advancing Northern Alliance, it will be said, is "just as bad" as the Taliban. The Northern Alliance is a motley crew, divided among themselves. We do not get to handpick our allies in war: we work with what is there. The fissiparous conflicts of the region have produced a bloodthirstiness and appetite for vengeance that must be stemmed.
It is hardly surprising that the Alliance took Kabul when it was there to take and I can't think that the West's leaders were not well aware that this was likely to happen.
All the more reason why the diplomatic offensive is now as important as the military one. The international community has a chance of leverage with the Northern Alliance to create a multi-ethnic government and a successor administration that can work. We must not fail to use it.
Even if we succeed, Afghanistan will not look like heaven on earth any time soon. But neither will it look quite so much like hell. No such advance could be achieved while the Taliban were in power, a fact that all but the most bone-headed of the anti-war camp must concede.
I have genuine understanding for those motivated by the humanitarian aspects of this crisis. But they were still wrong to oppose the intervention. What Afghanistan needs is clear routes of safe delivery for aid this winter without a corrupt and brutal government holding sway over the distribution. The quickest route is through Uzbekistan, an access route only possible after the fall of Mazar. Aid will be more, not less, efficiently delivered this winter as a result of this war.
Without his Taliban backers, Mr bin Laden's position is far more vulnerable than it was. To the objection that any fate that befalls him from now on, be it death or capture, will render him a martyr, I can only say that I had rather live with that prospect of his martyrdom, literal or figurative, than him running an extensive terror network under the protection of a rogue state.
Not intervening in Afghanistan would have been the real immoral choice. "First do no harm" may be a sound ethical injunction. But there is also an imperative to prevent the doing of further harm, which is why a campaign against fundamentalist terror must be waged from the start in all seriousness.
If there weren't more setbacks to come, I'd be amazed. We are nowhere near the finishing line of a campaign against fundamentalist terror but we have made a convincing start in a very short time. One of the worst regimes on the planet in modern times is on the retreat. It would be a bit odd if the beleaguered citizens of the Afghan capital were casting off their burqas and brandishing their forbidden radios in celebration, only for Media Workers Against the War and co to go tell us that their liberation is a disaster and should never have happened.
a.mcelvoy@independent.co.uk
)
)
