LONDON: 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.

The war’s stated purpose: to bring to justice those who had helped to mastermind the atrocities of Sept 11, and eliminate the bases where the terrorists had learned their skills. All the information 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 Qaeda network were Afghans.

That Osama bin Laden 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 harbour 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 harbour killers”.

More importantly, the Taliban had no way of enforcing their will on Osama. If Donald Rumsfeld, with his infra-red 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 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 Osama was laughable, although Mullah Omar did, of course, ask a shura of religious leaders to consider the problem and they did recommend Osama 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 Oct 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.

There is no brief held for the Taliban, but there is also no brief held for an approach to politics which consists of demonising your opponents, over-personalizing issues and evading nuanced judgments. The Taliban were not monsters. They were a wild mixture of religious fundamentalism, puritan ideology, Pakhtoon nationalism and the social norms of the Afghan village, common to every Afghan ethnic group. Go to the Afghan districts of Quetta, or watch the TV pictures of “liberated” Kabul, and you will see the burqa everywhere. The total veiling of women did not begin with the Taliban and has not ended with their demise.

Legally, it is doubtful whether the two UN resolutions which preceded the military strikes permitted an attack on the Taliban, as opposed to Al Qaeda. 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. 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 neighbouring countries would only grudgingly open their gates. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.