Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Nessuno soffre per i Taliban, ma non prendiamoci per il culo

Published on Tuesday, December 11, 2001 in the Guardian of London 
Fighting the Wrong War
Afghans Have Paid a High Price for a Campaign That Has Failed to Meet
Its Original Aims
 
by Jonathan Steele 
 
 The toppling of the Taliban may eventually prove to be the best thing
to have happened in Afghanistan for a decade. But it was not an
initial aim of the US-led war. In the wake of their departure from
Kandahar, that point cannot be stressed enough, before the drumbeat of
triumphalism deafens us all. Victory over the wrong opponent is not
much of a victory. It sounds more like "collateral benefit" - provided
we are sure the benefit outweighs the costs.
Remember the war's stated purpose: to bring to justice those who had
helped to mastermind the atrocities of September 11, and eliminate the
bases where the terrorists had learned their skills. All the
information available (and it was known before the first missile was
launched against Afghanistan) suggests that the 19 hijackers trained
for their mission in Europe and the United States, and entered the US
with legal visas. Evidence that they personally had any connection
with Afghanistan has been minimal, verging on nil. No suggestion has
ever been made that any of the al-Qaida network were Afghans.
That Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida, had lived in
Afghanistan for over five years was well known. That he had inspired
the concept of a high-profile attack on US targets of symbolic
national significance - without necessarily choosing the methods, the
timing or the men - was a reasonable suspicion. But where does that
put the Taliban? There has been much indignant talk about "people who
harbor terrorists". Unload the emotion, and this is not much more
useful than describing European states which decline to deport murder
suspects to the US as "people who harbor killers".
More importantly, the Taliban had no way of enforcing their will on
Bin Laden. If Donald Rumsfeld, with his infrared laser-guided
heat-seeking cave-buster bombs, cannot find Bin Laden after nine weeks
on the job, how does he expect the Taliban to have done better? As
Ahmed Rashid's excellent book on the Taliban makes abundantly clear,
Mullah Mohammed Omar is no Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. He
did not run a "war machine" or a "police state". Afghanistan was an
impoverished and destroyed society with minimal infrastructure, in
which the concept of governance meant nothing more than the use of a
few satellite telephones to issue social edicts which the so-called
religious police enforced. Almost every urban service, from education
to health to food, was provided by outside aid agencies or privately
by Afghans on their own. Villages had to fend for themselves.
To imagine that in such a vacuum of government the Taliban could
arrest Bin Laden was laughable, although Mullah Omar did, of course,
ask a shura of religious leaders to consider the problem and they did
recommend Bin Laden leave Afghanistan and be tried before an Islamic
court elsewhere. If toppling the Taliban arrived late as a war aim
(Tony Blair only stated it unequivocally on October 30, three weeks
into the bombing campaign), it seems to have emerged through
desperation and cynicism. Realizing that finding Bin Laden might prove
impossible, the war leaders turned their sights on the Taliban
instead. Politically, they were easy meat. Few in the western world,
women or men, would grieve to see them go. Commie-bashing was never as
simple as this.
I hold no brief for the Taliban, but I also hold no brief for an
approach to politics which consists of demonizing your opponents,
over-personalizing issues and evading nuanced judgments. The Taliban
were not monsters. They were a wild mixture of religious
fundamentalism, puritan ideology, Pashtun nationalism and the social
norms of the Afghan village, common to every Afghan ethnic group. Go
to the Afghan districts of Quetta in Pakistan, or watch the TV
pictures of "liberated" Kabul, and you will see the burka everywhere.
The total veiling of women did not begin with the Taliban, and has not
ended with their demise.
In an earlier war western governments and compliant journalists
demonized Afghanistan's communists, ignoring the fact that their
social and gender policies throughout the 1980s were enlightened. In
those days the west armed and aided the fundamentalists and those who
wanted to deny women's rights. So demonizing the Taliban came
naturally. Yet, as aid agencies have testified, the Taliban produced
order in place of civil war. "With the Taliban there was a certain
amount of security in the areas they controlled. I wouldn't say the
Taliban were supportive, but a lot of aid went in - there was
acceptance," says John Fairhurst, Oxfam's program director for
Afghanistan. "Now we have local commanders looking to take advantage
of the collapse. You also have bandits thinking they have more freedom
to operate".
Legally, it is doubtful whether the two UN resolutions which preceded
the military strikes permitted an attack on the Taliban, as opposed to
al-Qaida. What of the costs of the bombing? Perhaps around 1,500
innocent people have been killed, if one assumes an accident rate of
about 150 a week. (America's anti-Taliban allies in Jalalabad reported
as many as 300 civilian victims in that one area last week.) The air
strikes have driven at least 600,000 people from their homes. This is
comparable with Milosevic's deportations from Kosovo during the NATO
bombardment. But while he committed his crimes in springtime, with a
host of agencies to help the refugees as they crossed the border, the
US launched its Afghan assault in winter, in a situation where
neighboring countries would only grudgingly open their gates.
Half the population of Kandahar, a third of Kabul, and thousands more
from the north, fled the terror and were left wandering inside
Afghanistan in cold and hunger. Not much of this has reached the
world's attention. Two years ago the remote town of Kukes in Albania
was host to hundreds of reporters and film crews sending daily
interviews with refugees to eager editors. In this war the comparable
town of Chaman in Pakistan produced few such dispatches, barely one a
week per paper - the refrain became: "My desk just glazes over if I
suggest another refugee story".
Finally, there is the time lost in delivering food, blankets and
medicine to the hundreds of thousands people displaced by drought
before the bombing started. For three months very little aid has been
going in. "The politics have changed dramatically but the humanitarian
situation remains dire," says Tim Pitt of Medecins sans Frontieres.
"Before September 11 we were reaching upwards of one million people.
Now it's less than that".
With the fall of the Taliban, Tony Blair talks of "total vindication"
and supporters of the war call for apologies from those who opposed
it. OK, I was wrong. On October 6, I wrote: "Missile strikes will just
be the hors d'oeuvre. The main meal will be a sustained campaign to
arm the Taliban's opponents, the Northern Alliance, so that they can
seize Kabul and take power." I am truly sorry - I never thought the
air war would be so off target, and bring so much misery to so many
innocent Afghans.
Toppling the Taliban may eventually give Afghanistan the chance of
good government. Many of those in the interim authority are
modernizers, rather than jihadis; there is an ethnic balance; foreign
governments may send in an efficient peacekeeping force to keep the
warlords at bay; aid flows may be restored to pre-September levels.
But these possible benefits are in the future. The costs have already
been paid.

 been paid.
	E guarda come sta bene la Germania, oggi. Ha pagato il suo
	prezzo per liberarsi dal nazismo, ma non credo che siano in
	molti a lamentarsene, oggi.
	Ciao,   Carlo

  molti a lamentarsene, oggi.
A liberarsi dal nazismo no.  Ma cosa pensano i tedeschi di Bomber
Harris,
per esempio?   Gli sono grati?
GT

 been paid.
"may eventually give...the chance"..."may send"..."may be restored"...
"possible benefits" .."..in the future"...
Questo deve essere senz'altro un esempio di "nuanced judgements".
Tanto nuanced che non si capisce dove va a parare.
Ciao,
Filippo