US war: a moral and political disaster
dawn.com
By Nick Cohen
LONDON: The bombing of Afghanistan must stop. To say so is not to appease mass murderers by pretending they are misunderstood fighters against imperialism. You can think, that the sum of human happiness would inflate exponentially if the Taliban and their Arab allies were driven from power.
You can believe that the atrocities of Sept 11 changed the world and made hitherto unthinkable expedients necessary. You can even fall in love with Tony Blair's mythical America which stood "side by side with us" in the Blitz of 1940, rather than staying out of the Second World War until 1941, and was "born out of the defeat of slavery", rather than a declaration of independence by, among others, slave owners.
You can hold all these views simultaneously and still argue that this war is a moral and political disaster. Its worthwhile ends are unattainable. Its means are self-defeating. The choice before America and her supporters in Britain is to back off or inflict a famine on Afghanistan which will kill tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands and take the case for a just war with them.
Tolerance of starvation is unconscionable. It dumps supporters of bombing in the same intellectual wastebasket as those who mutter that America "had it coming". Afghan peasants, like the workers in the World Trade Centre, are not strictly culpable, you understand. But if they are in the wrong place under the wrong government then, somehow, they deserve to die.
Everyone in a government cannot be expected to be distracted by ethical arguments. Hardened socialists and pacifists make up the government. For all their fierce anti-Americanism, they were too filled with shock and sympathy on Sept 11 to match the seediness of the propagandist's cry: "Everyone else thinks the extermination of thousands is a problem! I see it as an opportunity!"
New Labour is beginning to worry about the political 'collateral damage'. The formal war aim - the defeat of terrorism - is a fantasy. More realistically, we might have hoped war would do the world a favour by bringing justice of a kind to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban without creating the resentments which will breed further violence.
Starvation in Afghanistan dashes modest hopes. It provides the inspiration for future suicide bombers while inflaming intelligent Muslim opinion. The Prime Minister's interviewer on al-Jazeera TV made a comparison we are going to hear many times in the coming months.
Iraqis are still paying the price of the Gulf war of 1991, he said. "They are under sanctions and about one million Iraqi children died because of famine. Aren't you repeating the same thing in Afghanistan now?" Blair said, quite rightly, that hunger in Iraq was the fault of Saddam Hussein. He did not answer the Afghanistan question.
Famine was coming anyway. aid-agency Oxfam warned before Sept 11 that drought and the economic consequences of a Taliban theocracy which could not create a civilization worth clashing with would leave 1.9 million Afghans hungry by the end of the year. Clare Short, UK secretary for International Development had been saying for months that Afghanistan was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Christian Aid spent the summer planning an Afghan appeal for Sept 15. The eradication of the means of life in Afghanistan did not therefore arrive out of a clear blue sky.
The kamikaze attacks halted United Nations food deliveries for three weeks. They started, stopped again when the bombing began on Sunday, and then restarted. The UN had 9,200 metric tons of food inside Afghanistan on Saturday. Officials in the World Food Programme calculate the country needs 52,000 metric tons from outside a month.
Their horrendous difficulty is not finding supplies. The Bush administration has belied its reputation for know-nothing callousness by being exceptionally generous in circumstances which might have induced parsimony, as, indeed, has Britain. There is plenty of food near the borders. But getting it in before winter closes the mountain roads next month is a nightmare. Afghanistan must have a five-month stockpile - 250,000 metric tons - in place within five weeks. If it does not, then voices as sober as Andrew Natsios, the administrator of Bush's US Agency for International Development, say 1.5 million Afghans risk starvation and seven million will face critical food shortages.
America cannot define her enemies. If the Taliban are ejected, she does not know who should form the next government. Blair and Bush, however, are aware that they must convince the Muslim world that they are acting justly if they wish to escape a new generation of Osamas. Yet their war will exacerbate a famine which may further shred America's reputation in the region.
-Dawn/The Observer News Service.
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