-Caveat Lector-
William,
This was a complete waste of time. We haven't
accomplished anything in 2 months? Bullshit! We
haven't bombed an aspirin factory and called it
square!
So far we are doing more than Clinton did in 8 years!
We all knew that this anti-terrorism campaign wouldn't
be over soon, so shut up and be patient. To pretend
that Bush started this war upon public outcry is to
delude yourself. Bush was the first to proclaim on
Sept. 11, "This is war!". Disinfo is such an ugly
thing! I particularly love the way you liberals bitch
and moan about our war tactics but have absolutely no
great ideas of your own! What should we do, oh wise
one? Do any of you have a better way of confronting
the terrorists? And if you answer "Sing happy songs to
them", it's better than any of the rest of you have
recommended.
James
--- William Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> <A
>
HREF="http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j111201.html";>http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j111201.html</A>
>
>
>
> Behind the Headlines
> by Justin Raimondo
>
> November 12, 2001
>
> THE WAR IS A TRAP
> We've taken the bait
>
> Two months into the war, and the Americans were
> hard-pressed to point to a
> single success, never mind the proverbial light at
> the end of the tunnel. The
> argument that the Afghan war is a quagmire waiting
> to swallow them seemed
> more credible than ever, and significant voices of
> dissent were beginning to
> be raised, in Europe if not quite yet in America.
> Then, suddenly, a "victory"
> – the Northern Alliance, our foot-soldiers on the
> ground, scored a major
> success with the taking of Mazar-i-Sharif, and our
> laptop bombardiers exulted
> : On to Kabul! Ah, but <A
>
HREF="http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011110/pl/bush_musharraf_7.html";>not
> so fast</A>…
>
> 'TOTAL MAYHEM'
>
> President Bush was quick to announce that "We will
> encourage our friends to
> head south, but not into the city of Kabul itself."
> Oh? And why not? the
> media wanted to know. Bush was vague on this point,
> but his guest, Pakistan's
> President Pervez Musharraf, was more forthcoming,
> bluntly stating that the
> last time these guys took Kabul – from the Soviets
> – they carried out "total
> atrocities," and "mayhem" was the order of the day:
> "And I think if the
> northern alliance enters Kabul we'll see the same
> kind of atrocities being
> perpetuated against the people there." He might well
> have added: and, just
> like last time, Pakistan will have to deal with half
> a million refugees, as
> Afghans fleeing their "liberators" pour over the
> border in an unstoppable
> human wave.
>
>
> NO CUDDLING
>
> The American reluctance to cuddle up to the Northern
> Alliance is justified on
> a number of levels. To begin with, Musharraf is
> right about their thuggish
> proclivities: <A
>
HREF="http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/afghan-bck1005.htm";>Human
> Rights Watch has detailed their sorry record</A> on
> this
> score. After all, the very success of the Taliban in
> overthrowing them to
> begin with was due, in large part, to the
> Northerners' brutal campaign of
> pillage, rapine, and mass murder, which did not
> exactly endear them to their
> subjects. The Taliban, for all their ferocity,
> seemed like they might be an
> improvement over the Alliance: at least the violence
> of the former was
> predictable and focused on implementing some concept
> of law, even if it meant
> an absurdly extreme interpretation of the Sharia, or
> Islamic law. The
> violence of the Northern Alliance was – and is –
> utterly lawless. Just on
> moral grounds alone, they are insupportable (unless,
> of course, you're Bill
> Kristol or Richard Perle, in which case the horrific
> human rights record of
> our unsavory Afghan allies is just another way to
> show how tough-minded we
> are).
>
>
> THE AFGHAN SNAKE PIT
>
> On practical grounds, however, the Northerners are
> even less attractive as a
> potential proxy force for the US. To begin with, the
> ethnic make-up of this
> tenuous Alliance makes its victory highly unlikely:
> for it is an alliance of
> three minorities which, taken together, add up to
> barely 50 percent of the
> population. Tajik supporters of (Tajik) President
> Burhanuddin Rabbani and
> Uzbeks of the Junbish-I-Milli party, have joined
> together with the Shi'ite
> Muslim Hazara of the Hezb-i-Wahdat against their
> common enemy of the moment.
> Riven by intense rivalries, these disparate and
> fully autonomous groupings
> have continually fought one another over the years,
> and could turn on one
> another at a moment's notice. And then there is the
> problem of the lack of
> military leadership….
>
>
> A DEAD END
>
> Nominally headed by President Rabbani, the Northern
> Alliance was up until
> September dominated by its military leader, the
> Tajik Commander Ahmed Shah
> Masood. Masood's untimely assassination at the hands
> of Bin Ladenite agents
> threw the leadership into the hands of a very dicey
> character, even by Afghan
> standards, Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum. In the
> 1980s, Dostum joined
> with Soviet puppet President Najibullah in fighting
> the anti-Communist
> insurgents: when the rebels took Kabul he decided to
> go with a winner and
> abruptly switched sides. The Taliban regime sent him
> fleeing northward, where
> he established his own fiefdom headquartered in
> Mazar-i-Sharif; although he
> was being aided by Russia, India, and Iran, Dostum
> couldn't hold on even to
> that, and was soon driven out of the country. He
> took refuge in Turkey, and,
> on his return, once again joined up with the
> Northern Alliance: the Uzbek
> commander is the logical successor to Masood –
> except that, politically, his
> pro-Communist record makes him political poison and
> isolates the anti-Taliban
> opposition even more. So the irony is that, even as
> they rack up military
> victories, the Northern Alliance – with the
> support of a rapidly shrinking
> sector of the population – is a strategic
> dead-end, and the Bush
> administration knows it.
>
>
> WAR BY PROXY
>
> The success of the proxy force strategy rests on the
> task of somehow
> appealing to the Pashtun majority in the central and
> southern regions of the
> country, including the area around Kabul, but there
> is little chance of that
> at the present juncture. The only other contender
> for Pashtun loyalties who
> might be enticed into the ranks of the Alliance is
> Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
> onetime leader of the Islamic Party, known as the
> Butcher of Kabul: his siege
> of that city in 1992 resulted in 20,000 civilian
> deaths. <A
>
HREF="http://sg.news.yahoo.com/011003/1/1jspu.html";>Not
> many relish the
> thought of Hekmatyar's return</A>. In any case, <A
>
HREF="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=823983869";>he
> has just announced that he
> might indeed return – to fight at the side of the
> Taliban.</A>
>
>
> INTO THE QUAGMIRE
>
> As we get bogged down in the details of which tribe
> should get which
> ministerial post in a postwar government, the
> distance from the original
> cause of the war grows until the connection between
> the two is so tenuous as
> to be nonexistent (or, at least, deniable). Only the
> other day, US combat
> commander Tommy Franks did indeed deny it, declaring
> that the targeting of
> Bin Laden – "dead or alive," as Bush put it – <A
>
HREF="http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/08/pentagon-toll.htm";>is
> not the goal of the US
> military mission</A>. But then, what is the goal?
> The overthrow of the Taliban?
> The restoration of the Afghan monarchy? The
> "liberation" of Afghan women? The
> implantation of democracy in the most inhospitable
> soil imaginable? The
>
=== message truncated ===
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