War View: This is no time for eating words

Ghada Karmi

Ghada Karmi, an academic and leader of the UK's Palestinian Community Association, says she was right to criticise the bombing of Afghanistan.

Last week the supporters of the "war against terrorism" were celebrating the rapid fall of the Taleban and jeering at those who had doubted the wisdom of the Afghan bombing campaign.

Those who had opposed the war were told that they should now eat their own words.

US bombing, the argument ran, had removed the Taleban government that supported Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network. Finding and killing him along with his lieutenants was now just a matter of time. That would eradicate the terrorist threat.

Show not over

At the same time, and in order to deflect criticism from the American action, a rehabilitation package for Afghanistan is being drawn up.

But, as at the beginning of the attack on Afghanistan, there are more questions than answers.

The show is far from over.

The war was supposedly against terrorism. Yet, these are so far its major gains: the removal of an evil Afghan regime and what looks like its replacement with another.

The Northern Alliance, which only massive American bombing enabled to defeat the Taleban, has a reputation for human rights abuses as unsavoury if not worse than that of its predecessor.

Massacres

Despite the Alliance's willingness to accept a broad-based government at the moment, there are no guarantees of its cohesion and continued good behaviour.

Already snippets of information have penetrated the information fog that surrounds this war to show that massacres and abuses have already occurred - in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz, for example - under Alliance command.

Osama Bin Laden and his men, the arrest or killing of whom was supposed to be the objective of the whole enterprise, remain at large. Despite reports that the net is closing in, there are no reliable indications as to exactly where he is.

Pipeline

And even if he were caught and eliminated, would that disable his entire network and mean the end of anti-US terrorism? If Bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation were demolished, would that prevent the re-emergence of new groups with similar aims in other places?

If the American attack on Afghanistan is indeed a war on terrorism, and is not related (as some suspect) to the longstanding US aim of building a pipeline to carry oil and natural gas from the central Asia through Afghanistan, then its outcome is likely to be the opposite.

If the military action is widely seen, and not just in the Islamic world, as having disproportionately punished ordinary Afghans, destroyed their county further and created millions of refugees, it can only have engendered bitterness and resentment.

If the US abandons the Afghans to their fate, moves on to other countries "harbouring terrorism" (such as Somalia, Yemen and Iraq) and dishes out similar punishment, the impetus towards more anti-US terrorism will be irresistible.

Root causes

This war has not yet addressed the root causes of anti-American feeling so violent that it drove some men to commit the horrific acts of 11 September.

To understand, Americans will need to examine their foreign policy which, according to the writer Madeleine Bunting is driven by a lethal mixture of righteous anger, superior military/economic power and ignorance of the rest of the world.

Unless these attitudes change, the war of anti-US terrorism will not have ended with Afghanistan but only just begun.