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October
3, 2001
Ariel
Dorfman:
America
the Wounded
Lennie
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Dr.
Watson in Afghanistan
Steve
Perry:
Ashcroft's
Scare Tactics
October
2, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn:
Inside
an Afghan Hospital
Richard
Manning:
A
Vietnam Vet on Patriotism
St. Clair/Cockburn:
Tarnished
Star,
Tom Ridge in Vietnam
October
1, 2001
Noam
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Memo
to Hitchens
Hizam
Bitar:
Refuting
Michael Kinsley
David Grenier:
The
Good, The Bad,
and the Ugly
Douglas
Valentine:
Homeland
Insecurity
Carl
Estabrook:
Stop Bush's Killing
Mahajan/Jensen:
Food,
Fear and War
Patrick
Cockburn:
Ready
to Strike
Cockburn/St.
Clair:
Things
Could Be Worse
Terry
Allen:
Early
Profit-taking and 9/11
September
29, 2001
Steve Perry:
The
Pentagon's Blueprint
Patrick
Cockburn:
When
Will the Missiles Fall?
September
28, 2001
Edward Said:
Backlash
and Backtrack
John Troyer:
When
Language Fails
Patrick
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In
Afghanistan, Waiting for the Real War to Start
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War,
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October
3, 2001
In Afghanistan
The Waiting Is the Hardest Part
By Patrick Cockburn
in the Panjshir
Valley
The Independent
Soldiers of the Afghan opposition will
launch ground attacks on the Taliban only when the US begins
military action in Afghanistan, a senior general of the Northern
Alliance has said.
General Feisal Ahmed Hazimi,
a veteran commander who claims to lead 10,000 troops, said:
"If the Americans attack then we will attack." He wanted
to see what kind of assault the US intended before committing
his troops.
General Hazimi, one of the
most powerful of the opposition military leaders, who is in
command of a vital section of the front in Kapisa province, north
of the Afghan capital, Kabul, made clear that the Northern Alliance
wanted to see the Taliban weakened by US air attack before taking
the offensive. His officers made the same point.
In a badly damaged white building,
pitted with holes from shrapnel and bullets, which serves as
his headquarters on a hilltop overlooking the front line, Commander
Selim, a lightly bearded 32-year-old soldier, has no doubt about
what is going to happen. Gesturing towards the Taliban lines
a mile ahead, the officer, who has been fighting since he was
12, said: "If the US starts a bombardment, we'll attack
for sure. We are already mobilised."
The front line was quiet yesterday,
though there was a distant thump of machine-gun fire somewhere
in the flat green plain where the Northern Alliance and Taliban
lines meet. In front of his headquarters, once the administrative
centre of Kapisa province, Commander Selim had stationed a tank,
but there was no sign of it going anywhere.
Asked if there had been any
serious fighting on his front in recent days, he said: "Oh,
yes. We don't throw stones at each other here." He said
the Taliban had attacked immediately after the assassination
of the Northern Alliance's military leader, Ahmed Shah Masood,
but had been thrown back.
Commander Selim added that
a Taliban rocket had killed two civilians and wounded two others
when it hit the village of Mahmoud Raqy the previous day. In
this heavily populated area villagers are too poor even to flee.
They must stay and till their fields or starve.
An elderly white-bearded man
from the village called Fazil Haq, standing outside the military
headquarters, said: "Yes, it is dangerous for us to live
here, but what else can we do? Five of our people were killed
and six wounded by a rocket a week ago."
Commander Selim appeared confident
of success if he attacked during an American air assault against
the Taliban.
He said that he had 2,000 men,
and though all sides systematically exaggerate their numbers
in Afghanistan this is probably close to the truth. As we looked
out over the valley, a man introduced himself as Nasrullah and
said he was the chief logistics' officer for Commander Selim's
forces.
Nasrullah was not in a good
mood. He said that, in the area around the headquarters alone,
"I am expected to feed 1,200 soldiers and they supply me
with only poor quality rice for 200 men. I also try to give them
meat three times a week."
On our return, we skirted the
mud-brick houses of the village of Mahmoud Raqy, where Commander
Selim had told us that a rocket had landed the previous day.
We wondered what had happened to the two wounded, and stopped
at a first-aid station organised by the Italian charity Emergency,
some five miles behind the front line. It was staffed by two
Afghan nurses called Mahmoud and Jan Mohammed, and they had
treated the people we
inquired about.
To give further details they
opened a big blue book in which they had meticulously recorded
the casualties they treated.
The wounded from Mahmoud Raqy
were women, Najmuddin Bawaf Shah, 35, and Aligoul Faselah, 17,
who had both been badly injured in the legs by the Taliban rocket.
Mahmoud said: "They have been sent to a proper hospital
in the Panjshir Valley."
In the southern Afghan city
of Kandahar, thousands of protesters marched and burnt effigies
of President George Bush, a Taliban official said.
The crowd gathered to show
its support for the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Mohammad
Omar, who have refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and instead
chosen to face the wrath of the US military.
In Washington, the Northern
Aliiance's envoy said American aid was being used to bribe Taliban
commanders and infiltrate their forces as part of the deal being
brokered to overthrow the regime.
In an interview with The Independent,
the envoy, Haron Amin, said the alliance was already making
inroads in destabilising the Taliban forces and recruiting deserters,
including field commanders. Money was needed to "bribe
Taliban commanders and back people who were countering terrorism",
he said. Mr Amin claimed alliance members had already infiltrated
the Taliban forces inside Afghanistan, who were presumably providing
information on which commanders might be susceptible to bribery."We
know the geography, we have the people, we speak the language.
We can infiltrate the forces of the Taliban. This could be crucial,"
he said. CP
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