Reassessing the Afghan War

Norman Solomon and Eric Margolis take up the revelations from the NY Times two weeks ago that the war against Afghanistan failed to thwart terrorism.

Margolis writes, "This dismaying report confirms what this writer has been saying in columns and on CNN since 9/11. A full-scale military invasion of Afghanistan would prove futile; the correct response was intelligence and police work, not brute force." His conlusion: "Afghanistan, billed only last fall as a triumph for America and President Bush, is now looking less and less like a victory and more each day like the beginning of a long, bloody struggle that could and should have been avoided."

Solomon observes that "Such a flat-out conclusion -- about 180 degrees from the trumpeted rationale for spending billions of our tax dollars to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan -- might seem to merit more than a few dozen words. But the Times did not belabor the point. The assessment, while prominent, was brief and fleeting. It seemed to cause little stir in American news media." He then goes on to quote a Jonathan Steele report for the Guardian which reassessed the war in light of the report:

"Forget, for a moment, the hundreds of civilians killed by bombs and the thousands who died of hunger during the disruption of aid supplies," Steele wrote. "Ignore the dangerous precedent of accepting one nation's right to overthrow a foreign government, however brutal, by bombing another country. The crude test of the operation depends on whether the fall of the Taliban outweighs the high costs. In the euphoria of last December many people felt it did. Can they feel so sure six months down the line?"

Solomon's response: "Of course they can -- especially if those kinds of pointed questions don't get asked very often."