LONDON: British ministers warned in the weeks between Sept 11 and the start of the bombing that there would be a wobble early in the campaign. There would be civilian casualties, mistakes would inevitably be made and in the fallout there was the danger that the media would turn against them.
It is as if that early prediction is being played out line by line now. A string of military and diplomatic setbacks, Red Cross food stores bombed, growing scepticism in the media: the wobble is happening.
Prime minister Tony Blair issued a call for patience on Sunday. A Downing Street spokesman argued that the media’s impatience was driven by the 24-hour news industry’s constant need for developing storylines.
And the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, warning that it was impossible to “say for certain how long it is going to take”, said media commentators had forgotten that though there had been a similar rocky period during the Kosovo war, it had all come good in the end.
The ‘Kosovo wobble’ occurred when NATO bombed a tractor convoy carrying refugees in April 1999 and denied it, claiming that it was Serbian propaganda. Blair’s press supremo, Alastair Campbell, was sent to NATO headquarters in Brussels to sort out media presentation.
Parts of the press challenged the strategy, insisting that a war fought from the air could not be won and that ground troops would have to go in. In spite of the scepticism, Serbian resistance collapsed after 78 days.
The parallells with the Kosovo wobble are strong. Bombs are going astray in Afghanistan, the coalition is becoming jittery and Campbell has been sent to co-ordinate propaganda with Washington.
The critics’ fear that the government’s confidence that this will be a rerun of Kosovo, or even of the Gulf war nine years earlier, may be misplaced. Afghanistan is geographically much bigger and more rugged than Kosovo and there are a lot more uncertainties. In the war against Kosovo NATO was fighting against a state, but in Afghanistan the enemy is more elusive. And the Taliban, though not as well armed or trained as the Serbian army, is religiously motivated.
Even a Labour Party loyalist said on Sunday: “You wonder if they thought it all through. We want something done to bring these characters to book, but there is unease about the bombing.”
During the Kosovo war there were jitters in the international coalition. But those differences seem minor compared with the split opening up between the US and its British ally on the one hand, and the Muslim countries, especially Pakistan.
Despite their initial general support for the US war on terrorism, Pakistani ministers are now openly questioning the wisdom of relentless bombardment of Afghanistan: a strategy described by one Pakistani paper on Sunday as ‘senseless’. Other papers said that the US tactics were incompetent.
“The US objective of waging a war on Afghanistan does not seem to have been achieved,” Moinuddin Haider, the federal interior minister, said on Saturday. “Now the world, including Pakistan, has started thinking that whatever is currently happening in Afghanistan is not good. The Muslims are upset over a large number of civilian casualties.”
Pakistani commentators reflected the growing mood of scepticism. In an editorial, a leading Pakistan English language daily, described the bombing campaign as “now totally aimless”.
The pounding was “not troubling the Taliban,” it pointed out, despite “heavy collateral damage”. It added: “What was specially bizarre was the decision to change the target from Osama bin Laden to the Taliban three weeks into the operation.”
The bombing of civilians is having a huge influence on Muslim opinion. One British official admitted the problem: There are Muslims who know Osama bin Laden is nasty and would not like to be ruled by fundamentalists, and yet at the same time they can have sympathy for him.”
A Muslim commentator put forward a scenario in which Osama escaped from Afghanistan and turned up in Madinah or Makkah, prompting the fall of the Saudi government. Far-fetched? Perhaps, but it showed that Osama too has options.
Whitehall accepts in private that the coalition has probably reached its high point and that each day that passes the events of Sept 11 lose their potency. It was to draw up a transatlantic strategy to remind people that Campbell went to Washington.
One factor that US and British spin-doctors know they have to face is that unlike Kosovo, Afghanistan will have to be won on the ground, with the consequent risks to life and the threat of body bags filling television screens. Which raises the problem, as Straw made clear on Sunday, of the media itself. A 24-hour news media that needs to be fed makes the propaganda war more difficult. With few pictures coming out of Afghanistan, the focus is mainly on the US and its allies. Such introspection inevitably leads to increased scepticism. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
