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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: LindyBill who wrote (56869)11/13/2002 3:06:16 AM
From: Snowshoe  Respond to of 281500
 
Was it worth it? (The War in Afghanistan)
guardian.co.uk

Polly Toynbee was one of the most robust liberal supporters of the war on Afghanistan. Does she still think we did the right thing? One year after the fall of Kabul, we sent her there to find out.

Wednesday November 13, 2002
The Guardian

So was it worth it after all? The daisy-cutters and the cluster bombs, the misguided missiles butchering wedding parties while al-Qaida slipped away? Now, a year after Kabul fell as the Taliban left their hot dinners on the front line and ran, was it worth the killing of anything from 800 to 3,000 men, women and children?

Of course it was, said everyone I asked. They all had their grotesque Taliban tales. "Right there, bodies hanging, rotting, stinking!" said a trader in Chicken Street, the tourist trinket centre. Taliban horror stories poured out of everyone, unstoppable like water from a broken tap: "I was walking with my cousin and her husband outside here," said another man. "The vice and virtue police beat them both with big sticks, beat them to pieces, blood everywhere, because her ankles showed too much under her burka. I stood there, ashamed, but there was nothing I could do. I didn't go out after that." He was a young Pashtun and no friend of this new mainly Tajik government, but he had no doubt that the Americans did the right thing......