November 2, 2001	Friday	Shaba’an 15, 1422

LONDON: UK foreign secretary Jack Straw 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. 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 per cent 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, 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 here this week this 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 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 Osama easier.

But what a cost the effort to bomb the Taliban into defeat is having. During the Kosovo war everyone knew that Albanians were not 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 realize that the bombing is what is forcing frightened families to leave their homes. Aid agencies estimate up to 80 per cent of Kandahar’s people have fled. The figure for Kabul is similar. The fact that many have gone to the safety of 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.

UK international development secretary Clare Short said that three years of drought have led thousands of Afghans to abandon their homes in search of food, but she and other British 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 an ugliest regime, 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.

British 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. Trying to oust the Taliban by force is a sideshow which has turned hundreds of thousands into refugees, and disrupted aid. Even if it were to succeed, Al Qaeda would still be at large and fighting on. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.