Osama bin Laden has always had a single objective. It is not
to destroy the United States, but to gain political power. His
objective, in directing his spectacular assault against the
U.S., was to cause ferocious American reprisals that would
outrage Moslem fundamentalists. He has as his objective the
toppling of three governments: those of Pakistan, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia.
To win the war we are now fighting, the United States should
have done two things. The first would have been an
immediate surprise attack on Iraq, with the twin objectives of
the destruction of the infrastructure of Iraqi intelligence and
the killing of Saddam Hussein. This should have been carried
out immediately, without any warning to anybody. Second, a
substantial ground force should have been assembled and
sent into Afghanistan as quickly as possible, with the
objective of killing as much of the leadership as possible,
with
particular emphasis on Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
There was no need to build a ?coalition? beforehand. Speed
was essential. If we had one, we would have been able to do
all the coalition building we wanted to later.
The entire war should have been concluded within a month.
There should have been no attempt to wreck the Taliban
government and install a ?legitimate? regime, for the simple
reason that this is likely to be impossible. Whoever governs
Afghanistan does so at the sufferance of about two hundred
tribal leaders. These leaders, in turn, have the loyalty of
their
tribesmen. Thus, when American officials say that we
are ?after the Taliban? and ?have nothing against the Afghan
people,? they are speaking from a basic ignorance about
Afghanistan, the same ignorance that defeated the Soviets
and the British before them.
Government in Afghanistan is an organic process, and the
Taliban have succeeded for a simple reason: they have an
irresistible appeal to the tribal leaders. This appeal is
that the
Taliban are religious ascetics with no interest in getting a
piece of the drug trade. In fact, they officially disapprove of
it.
However, they are also practical, and their objections are
only pro-forma. They do nothing to prevent the drug running
activities of the tribes. The tribal leaders all know that no
U.S. backed government will give them the same freedom.
They will never support a ?legitimate? government, not as long
as the welfare of their people is dependent upon commerce in
heroin, which it most certainly is. The alternative to drug
money is stark: it is starvation and death.
The United States cannot defeat the Taliban unless it
accepts the drug trade, and it will never do that. At present,
it is not giving the Northern Alliance sufficient support to
enable them to make significant headway against the Taliban
because it fears that they will govern the country in the
same way that the Taliban are doing, with the difference that
they will inject themselves into the drug trade in a way that
the Taliban leadership has not.
The fact is that the Taliban and the Afghan people live by an
unholy compact: the Taliban is a popular government,
because it leaves people alone to do the business of raising
poppy and purifying heroin, which moves into Western Europe
via Iran.
Unfortunately, the longer we fight our war, the more
compelling the argument of the Moslem fundamentalists in
Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia becomes: throw off the
corrupt pro-western regimes; take the country back to God.
This combination of drug trafficking and religion is not viewed
as cynical or hypocritical among Moslem fundamentalists.
What non-believers do with their bodies is of no importance.
In fact, the more of them who are destroyed by drugs or
whatever else, the better.
Next week is going to be a crucial one in Pakistan.
Fundamentalists have declared a sit-down strike with the
objective of toppling the government. They have a
reasonable chance of success. And the longer our war goes
on, the greater their chance becomes.
Right now, the United States is apparently planning to ?wait
out? the Taliban across the harsh Afghan winter. The
assumption is that the Taliban will have a much harder time
getting supplies than we will. However, we have already
dropped tons and tons of food into Afghanistan, much of
which has been gathered up by Taliban forces. We are also
assisting the U.N. in its logistical efforts as it prepares to
feed Afghanistan across the winter.
In other words, the Taliban are not going to have a bad
winter. On the contrary, they will be the first to be fed?by
the Afghan people themselves.
There is a reason that the Afghan currency began to rise in
value immediately after the U.S. began bombing. Local
businessmen saw that this was not likely to be an effective
means of war-fighting. They also saw that the reduction in
policing and communications, and the increase in general
chaos, would actually serve the drug trade well. As, indeed,
it has: drug shipments out of Afghanistan have been
increasing steadily since the bombing started.
Of course, we could get lucky and somehow cause the
Taliban to fall with our bombing. It isn?t impossible. It?s
just
unlikely.
However, if we do indeed pursue a long war, it is likely that
we will sooner or later lose Pakistan and then Saudi Arabia to
Islamic fundamentalists. Later, Egypt will also fall. Osama bin
Laden will then have achieved his real goal, which is to
control the Moslem world, and most especially, to control the
oil.
The United States should have begun an aggressive campaign
to wean itself from the need for oil a long time ago. The oil
embargo of the seventies gave us fair warning. But we
allowed short-sighted oil companies to dupe us into believing
that the crucial geopolitical issue was actually an
environmental issue, and we dug our heels in and refused to
do a thing about it.
Now we are facing a very dire prospect indeed. Osama bin
Laden is a folk hero throughout a turbulent and truculent
Moslem world, while the regimes that are our allies are
despised, corrupt, and ready to collapse.
It is not likely that the strategy that the U.S. is pursuing in
Afghanistan will be effective?not unless God is literally with
us, and willing to produce a miracle. What is most likely to
happen is that the Pakistani government will collapse, if not
this week, then sometime in the next few months, and we will
be left not only without a base of operations, but with a
much larger enemy.
Pakistan, after all, has nuclear weapons. So Osama bin
Laden, who has been attempting for years, to make his own
bomb, will get theirs. His prestige among Moslems will rise
higher than that of Gamal Abdul Nasser in the heady, early
years of Egyptian independence. He will sweep the corrupt
and hated Saudi Royal Family out of power with a flip of his
wrist. And then he will not only have the bomb, he will control
oil upon which most of Europe and Asia depends for very life.
Ironically, those who were so loudly preaching isolationism
before the war will get their wish, at that point. The U.S.
will
be more profoundly isolated and deeply helpless than it has
been at any time since the dark, early days of World War II,
when Japan and Germany were winning battle after battle,
and Britain and the U.S. were in danger of a defeat of world-
historical proportions.
Make no mistake, we are in a clash of civilizations, and an
ancient one. Moslem fundamentalists have not forgotten the
toppling of the towers of Granada by the ascendant Spanish
kingdom in the early fifteenth century. This long-forgotten
episode in the history of the west has not been forgotten in
the east. In the Wahhabite schools of Saudi Arabia, it is
taught to every child as a central failure of Islamic
history, a
defeat that must be avenged.
As things now stand, Osama bin Laden has a reasonably good
chance of exacting that long-awaited vengeance.
Related Entries:
13-Oct-2001: Conspiracy Theories: Should We Listen Now?
27-Sep-2001: The Terrorism Problem--How We Can Solve It
10-Feb-2003: Official Terror Worse than 'Night and Fog'
12-Sep-2001: What Next?
