We Asked Then, We Ask Now: What Are We Fighting For? *

In the immediate aftermath of 11 September, The Independent on Sunday raised a series of questions about the West's response to the suicide bombings in America. Two months after that date, after a prolonged bombing campaign in Afghanistan and on a day – Remembrance Sunday – when the dead of past wars are commemorated, we revisit those questions.

What are our war aims?

The scope of the war on terror is still dangerously imprecise. Mr Bush has made it clear that he would consider the killing of Mr bin Laden as legitimate; Mr Blair does not publicly endorse this view. A limited offensive, aimed at bringing him to justice by steadily unravelling his network across the Middle East and with due consideration for the suffering of the Afghan people, would be acceptable. An all-out war against an already exhausted and hungry people on the off-chance that it might yield up Mr bin Laden certainly is not.

Will we capture Mr bin Laden and dissolve the Taliban?

Early hopes that the Taliban would crumble and that the bombing would be avoided, or kept to a minimum, have been frustrated. We have been reduced to using B52 bombers, the blunderbusses of the skies, in an attempt to dislodge the Taliban. The fall last week of Mazar-i-Sharif, a Taliban stronghold, has been the goal of Western planners from the beginning. We hope that it accelerates the campaign towards a successful conclusion. But this is not simply a war on the classic model of capturing cities and permeating enemy lines. It is a war of hearts and minds, beliefs and prejudices and, in purely propaganda terms, Mr bin Laden's position is far better than it was at the beginning of this adventure.

What will be the wider reverberations of this war?

Osama bin Laden has become a cult around which the dispossessed and those frustrated with the West's self-absorption can coalesce. Western leaders may be loath to admit it, but many moderate Muslims throughout the world feel that the West's disproportionate attack on one of the most impoverished countries on earth is a stand against them. We do not doubt Mr bin Laden's wickedness, but an intervention that manages to make the sponsor of 11 September into an international cult figure can hardly be said to be succeeding. If he is taken alive, he will use the international dock to continue his propaganda war on behalf of fundamentalism against the West and against moderate Islam. If he is killed, he will become a martyr. Either way, we lose out.

What about the humanitarian aspects of this campaign?

The best reason to oppose bombing campaigns, whatever their strategic intention, is that they are too costly in civilian lives. We do not know how many people have been killed so far, but we do know that any prolongation of the bombing will endanger more civilians. B52s are not a precision weapon and do not differentiate between the guilty and the innocent. The Taliban are a ruthless enemy and very likely, under pressure, to disregard concerns for the safety of civilians and children. It is not enough for the West to say these deaths are on the conscience of the Taliban. They are on our conscience. The fall of Mazar-i-Sharif takes the pressure off the allied powers to achieve a result before the onset of winter. They should now scale down the bombing before Ramadan and let the aid convoys through the roads they now control. It is morally unacceptable and strategically unnecessary to continue the same level and intensity of bombing that we have witnessed to date. Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence, has promised to step up the aid supplies during Ramadan. The only way to do this with maximum effectiveness is to stop the bombing. Anything else is a gesture. People facing cold and famine deserve more than that.

Is al-Qa'eda being broken up?

Al-Qa'eda is a stateless group of individuals, sprung from the rotten loins of a corrupt Saudi Arabia, under Mr bin Laden's leadership. It attaches itself to various grievances in the Middle East, some of them well-grounded, some of them not. It has long been paid Danegeld by the Saudis, a fact that America and Britain, as long-standing friends and trading partners of the Saudis, have chosen to ignore. This is where the war on terror should have begun, and yet the West turns a blind eye to Saudi culpability and takes the easy way out – bombing Afghanistan, which is merely acting as a hotel for Mr bin Laden and his men. There is no evidence that the rest of the network is being dissolved or that its capacity to mount another major terror attack has been reduced since this campaign began.

Is the Northern Alliance an acceptable partner?

Few Western strategists and politicians have faith in the Northern Alliance, whose reputation for brutality and internecine feuding does not make it a promising partner for peace in post-war Afghanistan. Competing ethnic and military strands within it are just as likely to destabilise Afghanistan as they are to create a workable settlement. The alliance is likely to use the seizure of Mazar-i-Sharif to demand the right to take Kabul. Before any such development is allowed, the West must secure a means of monitoring this process. The Northern Alliance cannot be trusted not to carry out a bloodbath against the Pashtun population of the south and east. The West has an urgent responsibility to ensure that its dubious set of allies in this conflict are constrained by humane standards of behaviour.

Where will it all end?

The Bush administration has not ruled out widening the war aims to Iraq and the unseating of Saddam Hussein. We strongly agree with the assessment of the International Development Secretary, Clare Short, in her interview with this newspaper last month that looking for other countries to attack in a febrile global climate is an extremely irresponsible path to follow. The British government has not yet ruled out its support for such an option. We seek assurances that this damaging war will not be widened to cause even more instability for no reliable result. At a time when the nature of patriotism is being intensely discussed, the raising of searching, sceptical questions about these matters is urgently required. We will not stop asking them until we hear answers that make sense. They don't yet.

* Published by The Independent, United Kingdom, 11 November 2001.

Cuestiones de América Nº 6, Noviembre de 2001

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