-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,593080,00.html
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Our victory has proved the pessimists utterly wrong
Even if the Taliban fight a last stand, their myth has been exploded
Polly Toynbee
Wednesday November 14, 2001
The Guardian
The Taliban turned tail and fled so fast they left their dinner still
hot on the front-line. There was not even time for the eating of
words between the first and last editions of newspapers as Kabul
fell. Television reporters would have blushed to hear rebroadcast
words of foreboding they spoke so recently. Never in the field of
human conflict have so many experts of the highest renown been so
thoroughly wrong. Never have so many old warhorses of right and left
been so embarrassingly trounced.
That must be why the news passed abruptly from dire warnings of a
bloodbath ahead, to dire warnings about the make-up of the Kabul
government, with no pause to contemplate the enormity of what
happened in between. So on it goes, seeking out the next possible
source of trouble, not stopping for an instant to ponder this deeply
embarrassing good news.
To be sure, no one can know how good the final outcome will be. A stable multi-ethnic
government has not flown in to Kabul on a magic carpet to transform the stone age into
a fully-fledged democracy overnight. Anarchy thr
eatens in any sudden power vacuum: savage warlords may resume their old wicked ways
unless firmly checked. The Taliban may rally in its heartland. Osama bin Laden may
flee and commit worse atrocities from some other cave.
The large UN aid convoys now at last flowing across the border to the most
famine-stricken areas may not arrive soon enough for all. Such anxieties follow
victories everywhere - in Serbia or at the fall of Nazi Berlin.
Ah, the word slipped out. Victory? Did anyone say victory?
Just remember what they said: the Taliban was different, this was not war as we knew
it. Romantic Victorian paintings of British defeats were dusted down to warn of the
mythic Pashtun warrior spirit. Old film of Russian c
onscripts dying in the Afghan snow was shown to foretell the worst. The Pashtuns were
not men, but a rare breed of fighting machine, welded to their guns and tanks, hard as
their rocky land. The jihad martyrs would fight
to the terrible end. Defeat was not in the vocabulary of martyrs heavenbound for their
70 celestial virgins. Fractious rogues of the Northern Alliance could never beat
God-driven maniacs. Bombing would do no good, as the
crafty guerrilla army would flit from cave to cave. Bombing would kill thousands of
civilians without touching this will-o-the-wisp foe.
Well, it was all bunk. They were ordinary men after all. Religious delirium may seize
small groups, but faced with a choice between this life or the next, even the devout
cling to their mortal coil. So they fled.
A rollcall of names of doomsters would fill pages. Most carefully added that the
Taliban might succumb eventually to the Great Satan's airpower - but only after
slaughter on a hideous scale in prolonged battles: Vietnam.
If foreign troops were drawn in, all sides would unite against the intruders. Even
when Mazar fell, they said Kabul would be another story, but it wasn't: crowds cheered
foreign special forces and TV cameras entering th
e capital.
There may still be a bloody battle for Kandahar, or maybe not. James Meek's sharp and
witty frontline account of Taliban fighters morphing effortlessly into Northern
Alliance men tells the story. This is less about the de
ath of men, more about the death of an idea. Just as Nazism vanished into the ether as
Hitler's body burned outside his bunker, so the Taliban brand of insane fundamentalism
may now ebb away.
Even if they fight a bloody last stand, the Taliban myth is dead. Fleeing so far so
fast with barely a shot fired, their mystique is gone. Victory has a psychological
trajectory of its own which will speed across the Isla
mic world. It cauterises what went before, creates a new beginning, forces people to
think again. The ideal of the perfect Islamic state guided absolutely by a book
revealed centuries ago drew hot-headed (mostly middle cl
ass) Islamic youth from Arabia, Indonesia and Luton. This was a last stand against
modernism - encompassing any discontent any Islamic boy felt about the current order
in his country. For many the dream might have faded
when they saw the brutal reality of Taliban barbarism. For others this rout will
puncture the romance. Al-Qaida terrorists may keep fighting indefinitely but without a
firm geographical base they lack the aura of authori
ty given by the unvanquished Bin Laden/Taliban regime.
For Tony Blair's new world order, this was an essential event. If order in Afghanistan
was beyond the power of a global coalition, what hope was there for more difficult
problems? His speech on Monday night again revealed
his vision, more as a plea to the rich west than as a road-map: "One illusion has
been shattered on September 11: that we can have the good life of the west,
irrespective of the state of the world." As we go to print, th
e final outcome of the WTO talks was hanging in the balance: it will reveal whether
the rich have had any change of heart.
At least the ice cracked when agreement was reached on giving poor countries freedom
to break patents on essential medicines, a major breakthrough. But late night crises
saw the French and Irish digging in to defend their
agriculture subsidies against imports from developing countries.
There is depressingly little sign yet of the US forcing Israel back behind its
borders, but at least a free Palestinian state is now President Bush's declared aim.
Great intractables - democracy for Arabia, China, Kashm
ir, Kurdistan and other hard cases looks distant, though numbers living under
self-determination gradually grow.
The Afghanistan story raises the question: why is there an epidemic of pessimism in
the British media, relishing any prospect of failure? Partly it is the dysfunction of
Tory domination of the media, wishing Labour ill. T
hat is countered by leftwing voices opposing anything any an electable Labour
government might do. Beyond that a strangely irrational state of mind persists (a
contagion from rightwing US militias) that damns whatever gov
ernments do as pernicious, mendacious and self-seeking: rare well-
intentioned actions are bound to fail.
Such exorbitantly high standards are demanded of government
(minuscule misdemeanours by MPs are inflated into mega-fraud or
cronyism) that the cleaner politics gets, the more abuse it suffers.
Governments must deliver everything, yet their every effort is
rubbished. How did renationalising Railtrack become "Byers in
trouble"? How did Estelle Morris releasing teachers from oppressive
timetables and menial tasks become a negative story about cheap
substitution by classroom assistants? And now look how an astounding
rout of the Taliban is turned into a battery of exaggerated anxieties
about what comes next, when nothing could be worse.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
End<{{{
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
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