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To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (130766)	10/23/2001 8:15:21 PM
From: JHP	Read Replies (3) of 436258

Leading article: Northern Approach Putin has done the White House a service President Putin’s public rejection yesterday of any “moderate” Taleban participation in a postwar Afghan coalition must have embarrassed Colin Powell. It rendered the latest “Powell doctrine” obsolete within days of its enunciation in Pakistan last week. This is to be welcomed. It was a bad mistake even to hint that the US was willing to strike bargains with the regime harbouring Osama bin Laden. The Russian President is not always the soul of tact. But that does not mean that he has embarrassed the White House.Mr Putin had flown directly from Shanghai to meet the Northern Alliance leaders in Tajikistan. His claim to have reached a good understanding on Afghanistan’s future during his meeting with President Bush should be treated as credible. Mr Putin needs to be seen to be protecting Russia’s security interests in Central Asia; but these happen to coincide closely with US objectives. He has nothing to gain from Russo-American discord; nor do Afghanistan’s troubled neighbours. The Northern Alliance is a disorganised force but its local knowledge makes it an indispensable ally. The front lines have barely moved; but the stepped-up allied military effort means that they soon will. The question is how to back the alliance, all the way into Kabul if that is militarily desirable, without producing the politically undesirable outcome of continued civil war between its mainly Tajik and Uzbek fighters and the Pashtuns of the south, from which the Taleban draw their support. But there will be no stability until the medieval cruelties of the Taleban are brought to a humiliating end. General Powell’s mistake was to assume that all Pashtuns are Taleban. They are not; they are tribespeople, for many of whom the choice lay between arrest, or worse, and throwing in their lot with the Taleban. However big the tent, the Taleban oppressors have no more business inside it than do bin Laden and al-Qaeda; a regime that includes them can never command the assent of all. By making the crucial distinction that eluded General Powell, while insisting that Russia strongly supported the inclusion of all ethnic groups in a future government, Mr Putin has made it easier for the US to dig itself out of that hole. The suggestion of a deal was a poor way to persuade the Pashtuns to revolt; why turn on a feared regime that would continue to be a force to be reckoned with? General Powell has not been having a particularly good war; his is too conventional a mind to adjust to the special risks of a search-and-destroy campaign using small specially trained units, where success is hard to measure.It is important to take out whatever insurance is realistic against a power vacuum. But that should not dictate strategy. The priority is to disable bin Laden’s capacity to organise. In one crucial respect, there is real progress; although al-Qaeda’s networks abroad must be assumed to be still in place, Afghanistan is swiftly ceasing to be a functional base for bin Laden’s terrorist operations. But the Taleban and al-Qaeda forces that block the Northern Alliance have barely been attacked; it is their visible defeat that will encourage defections. This is military poker; and the US needs to play the game with a full hand. "Not by a spade alone shall we dig." Motto of the Association of One-armed Detectives

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