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December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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December
7, 2001
In Afghanistan
The End of a Strange War
By Patrick Cockburn
in Ghazni,
on the Kandahar Road
The end could be foreseen from the moment the
night sky over Kabul turned a bright yellow as the first American
bombs and missiles landed near the airport two months ago.
From a hill to the north of the capital
we could see the Taliban anti-aircraft fire, a few feeble sparks
of red and white, explode uselessly far below the American aircraft.
In few wars has the disparity of force between the two sides
been so obvious.
"They could not take any more American
bombing, so they had to surrender," said a young Northern
Alliance officer called Abdul Razeq yesterday morning as we drove
down the road from Kabul towards Kandahar. He explained that
his commander had just received a call from Hamid Karzai, the
anti-Taliban Pashtun leader fighting just north of Kandahar,
saying that the Taliban fighters were going to give up.
It has been the strangest war, decided
mainly by defections. Afghans had seen the first bombs come down,
just as we had done, and had concluded that the United States
and its local ally, the Northern Alliance, must win. Nobody here
likes to bet on a loser. In a quarter of century of war in Afghanistan,
sudden betrayals and switches of alliance, not battles, have
decided the victor.
All this was obvious yesterday in Ghazni,
the fortress city on the Kandahar road. Abdul Razeq had earlier
explained that what we were doing was a little dangerous. He
said that in Wardag, the first province we came to, the Taliban
"have joined our side, but only very recently and they still
have the same commanders. Sit in the back of the car and don't
get out."
Ghazni, a bleak city dominated by the
guns and tanks in its thousand-year-old citadel, had already
led the way for Kandahar. The Taliban have simply dematerialised.
In return for giving up power, they received a de facto amnesty.
Qari Baba, the ponderous- looking governor of Ghazni province,
had been appointed the day before. "I don't see any Taliban
here," he said, which was surprising, since the courtyard
in front of his office was crowded with tough- looking men in
black turbans carrying sub-machine-guns. "Every one of them
ex- Taliban," Abdul Razeq said as we got back in the car.
The reasons for the Taliban defeat are
obvious enough. There was the US bombing. There was the hatred
felt towards them by the non-Pashtun minorities, who make up
60 per cent of Afghans. Of the remaining 40 per cent, half are
women whom they treated as a sub-species. And the Pashtun
themselves were never united behind the regime.
But the Northern Alliance was also weak
and its military strength uncertain. Most males in Afghanistan
can fight. In October, I met a defector from the Taliban, a shopkeeper
from Kunduz in the north, whose captors were displaying him like
a prize marrow at a village fête. A small man, he had staggered
across no man's land clutching a sub-machine-gun, a Kalashnikov
and a pistol. I asked him how long the Taliban had trained him.
He said: "Just two days, but like everybody else here I
can use a gun."
There were few trained troops on either
side, apart from about 12,000 men drilled by Ahmed Shah Masood,
the Northern Alliance leader assassinated on 9 September. Even
these had their problems. One of them owned the Japanese pick-up
truck used by The Independent. An unsmiling man called Abdul
Rashid, he had taken it from the Taliban three years ago. He
once grimly explained to me that the 40 men he led would starve
if it was not for the rent from the truck.
In fact, the Northern Alliance played
its cards with great skill. At a moment when the world was desperate
for news from Afghanistan, it organised an airlift of journalists
across the peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains from Tajikistan
to the Panjshir valley just north of Kabul. This put the Alliance
on the political map of the world. Dr Abdullah Abdullah, its
suave and intelligent foreign spokesman, would meet us day after
day in the pretty garden of a government guest-house.
Working with the Northern Alliance, which
is partly armed and supported by Russia and Iran, was a little
difficult for the US to swallow. But it needed a local ally,
and the Alliance was the only game in town. Despite the offence
caused to Pakistan, America had to bomb the Taliban's frontline
trenches if it was to win.
The Taliban were always thought likely
to unravel in northern Afghanistan, where there are few Pashtun.
But at some point it seemed a hardcore of Taliban fanatics would
turn and fight.
They, however, turned out not to exist.
The swift rise of the Taliban, of course, had depended on Pakistan's
ISI intelligence service and Saudi money. But the surprise of
the war has been how few genuine fanatics belonged to the group.
A problem of covering the war was that
it was difficult to meet members of the Taliban. This was their
own fault, since they had banned the media at the start of the
crisis. After the fall of Kabul, I did meet Mullah Khaksar, who
had been the deputy interior minister. He said: "They did
not know what all the world knows, that the people hated them."
Yet when the Taliban had first taken Kabul in 1996, he had "liked
them because they provided security", he said and
he had not been alone.
The savage civil war between the different
parties of the Northern Alliance has reduced most of Kabul to
ruins. But the brutality of the Taliban and their obsession with
controlling people's private lives meant that they had long outlived
their welcome. The diminishing number of people who went to Kabul
sports stadium to see alleged thieves have their hands amputated
discovered that their bicycles were stolen while they watched.
Even those fond of innocent pleasures such as kite-flying were
rewarded with a beating or even prison.
There is still something terrifying
about the way in which the Taliban pursued their obsessions.
In Bamiyan, a valley in central Afghanistan, they destroyed two
colossal 1,500-year-old Buddhist statues, condemning them as
un-Islamic, earlier this year.
I thought one smaller statue in a distant
glen might have survived. But when I got there a local farmer
pointed to an empty stone niche in a cliff face, saying: "There
is nothing left. They destroyed it like they destroyed everything
else."
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