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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 14, 2001
Jensen/Mahajan
The
Press Must Press Harder on Afghanistan
David Vest
The Great Unificator
Harry
Browne
Preventing
Future Terrorism
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
November 9, 2001
Karen Snell
Torture By
Proxy
John Troyer
A
New Kind of Activism
Tariq Ali
Q &
A About the War
Michael
Colby
Schoolgirl
Gets Booted
for Anti-war Views
November 8, 2001
Mokhiber/Weissman
The
Cipro Rip-Off
Mitchel Cohen
The Smear Campaign
Against Nancy Oden
Steve
Perry
American
Roulette
November 7, 2001
Bahour/Dahan
Placebo Peace
Plan
Tom Turnipseed
Bush
Gives Billions
to His Oil Buddies
Cockburn/St. Clair
Greens, Airports
and
National ID Cards
Dr. Susan
Block
Ayatollah
Asscroft
Brian J. Foley
Bombing Campaign
Not "Self-Defense" Under International Law
November 6, 2001
Mark Scaramella
Where's
That Red Cross Money Going
C.G. Estabrook
Our Torturers
Sheperd
Bliss
Scott
Nearing on War
Rep. Ron Paul
Underwriting
the Taliban
Tariq
Ali
The
General Who
Came to Dinner
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI) Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
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bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
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Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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A Pocket Guide to
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November
13, 2001
Afghanistan: The Puzzle Palace
The Taliban
turn and run, but the real war may just be starting.
By Steve Perry
When Mazar-e-Sharif fell last Friday, U.S. war
planners and pundits sent their warm regards to the brave boys
of the Northern Alliance. Taking Mazar meant an allied supply
route through the heart of the country, they burbled-a felicitous
turn of events that stood to split the Taliban in half geographically
and afford the opposition a leg up in what was sure to be a grueling
series of battles in Kabul and elsewhere. When the Taliban fled
Herat and Kabul over the weekend, the celebratory proclamations
issuing from the U.S. grew more strained. By the time Kandahar
began to crumble late Tuesday, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
had to be rooting along with Mullah Omar as he took to the airwaves
to beg Taliban troops for a show of resistance. It's a rotten
thing they've done by turning tail and scatting before the U.S.
was prepared for the war to end.
If it has ended. The most immediate question
is whether the Taliban are fleeing in disarray or mounting a
strategic retreat from the cities into areas from which it's
easier to wage guerrilla war. I suspect the answer is a little
of both. It now appears that the most serious blow struck in
the U.S. bombing campaign was not to Taliban war materiel but
to their communication systems. Numerous reports say it's impossible
for Taliban factions in different parts of the country to talk
to each other except by horse-carried messenger. So it's quite
possible that what began as a strategic retreat from Mazar-e-Sharif
cascaded into a panicked desertion of other Taliban centers when
rumblings about Mazar began to circulate. As always there are
the obligatory and unverified reports of mass defections; more
concretely, London's The Independent reported that the
last remaining Taliban ambassador to Pakistan "shut up shop
in Islamabad and roared off in his Japanese four-wheel drive
to an unknown destination."
The Taliban may seek to regroup in the
mountains and fight a guerrilla war better suited to their strengths.
In fact the gentlefolk at Stratfor, the military/strategic think
tank, believe that's exactly what they mean to do. If so they
face dicey prospects. Supplies are the main issue. Having abandoned
vital shipping routes not only in Mazar-e-Sharif but also Herat,
Taloqan and Kunduz, they appear to be staking everything on the
goodwill and assistance of sympathizers in Pakistan. In the words
of Kim Sengupta, another correspondent for The Independent,
"The Taliban believe they will receive reinforcements
in this new war from across the Pakistani border from fellow
Pushtuns and also fresh waves of international Islamist volunteers."
If not, they're effectively finished. Afghan rebels fought for
a decade against the Soviet Union, but they were armed to the
teeth by the U.S. and others. Popular support is likewise a problem.
There are signs that the Taliban is despised even by many of
its tribal Pushtun brethren in the south. Indeed, the first word
concerning the fall of Kandahar was that anti-Taliban Pushtun
forces unconnected to the Northern Alliance had seized the local
airport.
But part of the infinite charm of the
place is that all this may change next week or next month. Conditioned
by millennia of tribal and ethnic conflict, the innumerable factions
that populate Afghanistan are accustomed to changing up their
allegiances with a speed and sang-froid that would leave
Machiavelli dizzy. Consider the case of Abdul Rashid Dostum,
the drug-trading Uzbek warlord who is one of the three generals
credited with taking Mazar-e-Sharif for the Northern Alliance.
An
excellent piece on the NA in Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly
summarizes Dostum's career thus: "A powerful player in Afghanistan,
Dostum is a political chameleon, having changed from fighting
alongside Soviet forces to taking up arms [against them] with
the mujahedin to allying with infamous extremist, Pakistani favorite
and former Prime Minister Gulbiddin Hekmatyar, to joining [the
Northern Alliance] Dostum is a wild card, not unlike many of
the [Northern Alliance] factions."
Do tell. The most intriguing dispatch
to appear in the American press in recent days was an analysis
piece by Mansoor Ijaz in
Monday's Los Angeles Times. Ijaz, a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations, wrote that he was recently told by Pakistani
fundamentalists in his acquaintance about a private meeting of
Afghanistan's loya jirga assembly that transpired in Peshawar,
Pakistan several weeks ago. There the various factions "seriously
debated" a reconciliation between the Taliban and the Northern
Alliance to combat any coalition Afghan government headed by
the deposed and decrepit former king, Zaher Shah. Ijaz adds this
footnote: "Credible reports from the region indicate that
Northern Alliance warlords are secretly supplying the Taliban
with war munitions at hyperinflated prices in a bid to keep all
their options open. After all, power, no matter how small a slice,
is the all-consuming end for these notoriously shifty characters."
It's a lovely bunch of folks we've climbed
in bed with. Funny no one outside the Middle East has thought
to ask who they are. Nyier Abdou, the journalist who authored
the Al-Ahram Weekly piece, observes that Americans and
Brits "hear terms like anti-Taliban and think of a tightly
organized, finely honed fighting machine, just waiting for its
chance to do what is right." To the contrary, he writes:
The NA are "a loosely knit collection of former mujahedin
commanders, Taliban defectors, regional leaders and foes-cum-friends."
Ethnically speaking they comprise, most visibly, elements of
Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara origin; many of their factions are traditional
enemies to each other, and more significantly they represent
minority groups in Afghanistan, where a plurality of the populace,
40 percent or so, claims Pushtun tribal roots, as do the leaders
of the Taliban. The NA's ethnic minority status is one of the
reasons no one thinks they can head a viable governing coalition.
Another reason is that they are easily
as brutal as the Taliban. Upon taking Mazar the NA made it a
first order of business to execute a hundred or so Pakistani
youths who had emigrated to the city to train as Taliban troops.
And yesterday the UK tabloid The Mirror contained graphic
descriptions of what happened to the Taliban stragglers and sympathizers
who crossed their path in Kabul: "The Taliban fighters were
beaten until their heads caved in. In a traditional Afghan symbol
of victory, 10,000 Afghani notes were stuffed into their mouths,
noses and what remained of their skulls. Other victims had cigarette
butts up their nostrils or their limbs hacked away."
But there were only a few dozen such
casualties on day one in Kabul, so it was a moral victory of
sorts for the West. The Northern Alliance has done much worse.
When it controlled Kabul from 1992-1996, tens of thousands were
slaughtered-drowned in wells, shut inside air-tight containers
to smother, lined up and shot into mass graves. The Al-Ahram
Weekly story notes that Human Rights Watch has "singled
out numerous groups and high-profile commanders in the Northern
Alliance as party to gross human rights infractions, not only
against Taliban fighters but against civilians and suspected
Taliban sympathizers." Casts rather a different light on
all those men in Kabul who shaved their beards, doesn't it? One
has to think a lot of them were simply trying to keep from being
slaughtered as Taliban sympathizers.
So now what? The flight of the Taliban
has left the U.S. in an awful mess. Whether they are licked or
merely in hiding, they've left a vacuum in the seats of power.
There is no semblance of a plan for a provisional government
or for any peacekeeping force to hold the NA in check. It's the
Alliance's ballgame for now, but they cannot hold the country
ultimately. The longer they are allowed to remain, the hotter
things will get for the U.S./U.K. axis and the Musharraf government
in Pakistan. National borders notwithstanding, about half of
Pushtuns live in Pakistan and half in Afghanistan, and neither
country will stand for a government by the ethnic minority Alliance.
Here's Kim Sengupta of The Independent again: "Millions
of ethnic Pushtuns, especially in North West Frontier Province,
support the Taliban and vilify the Northern Alliance. Pakistan
will have to reckon with their anger. Taliban commanders and
their feared Arab comrades may take refuge in the rugged hills
on the Pakistani side of the border, complicating the internal
security problems there." In fact there are several scenarios-a
continued power vacuum in Kabul, popular outrage in Pakistan
over the composition of a transitional government, or renewed
guerrilla strikes by the Taliban-that could carry the war right
across the border into Pakistan and topple the government there,
affording us all a chance to find out firsthand just how fail-safe
the components of their nuclear arsenal really are.
If there is a bright side to the past
week's events, it is that the Taliban retreat makes it much easier
to carry food and medicine into Afghanistan-though it remains
doubtful whether the U.S. will allow much of it to be distributed
in the south, where it's most needed, until the Bush administration
is sure the Taliban is vanquished for good. Odds are the aid
shipments will continue to be stinted. In the main, what the
U.S. has purchased so far with its support of the Northern Alliance
is a very large headache.
As for tracking down Osama bin Laden-remember
him?-American officials admit their efforts have so far come
to nothing. We can bomb all we like, but as a former secretary
of the Army admitted on Fox News this morning, we won't find
Osama unless someone in his inner circle gives him up. CP
Steve Perry
writes frequently for CounterPunch and is a contributor to the
excellent cursor.org
website, which offers incisive coverage of the current crisis.
He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
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