Since I am, fairly often, making posts on this list criticizing American allies for not acting to help us in our war on terror, I think it's worth pointing out that we are actually receiving quite a lot of help in Afghanistan right now, and this is not being covered by press much. There is a larger point to this, although in and of itself pointing out what our allies have done is a worthy thing to do. Some particular units:
Canada's excellent JTF-2 is on the ground in Afghanistan right now - about 800 men, from what I can tell. They are apparently working with the 101st Airborne. JTF-2 is reputed to be trained up to the standards of its more famous cousins, the SAS and Delta - all of these units cross-train so much that they're virtually interchangeable anyways, incidentally. There are also apparently 96 elite German soldiers on the ground as well. This is part of a rather disturbing piece of new,s however - http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=04032002-122559-3568r. In summary, UPI is reporting that the families of these soldiers are getting phone calls where an anonymous caller tells them "Your husband is dead." Since the IDs and home phone #s of these soldiers are obviously very tightly concealed, this is extremely worrying. There are also apparently Danish and Norwegian forces on the ground as well, although I know less about them. A real sign of the unity of the West, however, is the fact that men from six countries - all volunteers from free democracies, of course - are risking their lives _together_ to destroy Al Qaeda. It's easy to forget the immense unity of the West in the face of this threat when we're talking about differences in immediate tactics, not long-term ends. There are, however, reasons that this unity is overwhelmed. For example, http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/03/05/nleft05.xml &secureRefresh=true&_requestid=23574. The link requires censorship, but it's free, and the Daily Telegraph publishes John Keegan, the world's best military historian, so it's well worth it. In this case, what it's reporting is the protests of a significant number of prominent British leftists who claim to have been censored by the left-wing press in Britain. They all report that they have been prevented from publishing articles supporting Tony Blair and the United States in the current war effort. The effect of things like this is that the overwhelming unity and mutual support that the nations of the Free World have shown for each other in this crisis gets obscured because a small number of people with unusual influence want it that way. In reading about differences between Europe and the United States, for example, it's definitely worth keeping in mind that you often aren't getting a real sample of even elite opinion, much less the opinion of the public in general. Gautam
