|
 hose
who watch the progress of war from home must be patient with tactical
execution, impatient with strategic indecision.
Almost from
the beginning President Bush has expressed our injuries and our
goals with eloquence and force. His speech to the United Nations
General Assembly was as powerful as his speech to Congress, filled
with lines bound for the headlines, and the history books: (of
the 9/11 murderers) "[They] killed with equal indifference
and equal satisfaction"; (of the murderers' worldview)
"Few countries meet their exacting standards of brutality and
oppression"; (of their silent partners) "The allies
of terror are equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to
justice"; (of terror in general [cc. Yasser Arafat, Gerry
Adams, et al.]) "No national aspiration, no remembered
wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent";
(of our historical moment and its responsibilities) "The
time for sympathy has now passed; the time for action has now arrived."
The audience
for such performances naturally wants to know who Bush's writers
were; they should be proud. But the fact remains that every president,
even in the age of the ghost, gives the speeches he deserves. They
are written with him in mind, and he signs off on the texts. The
aimless — among whom Bush, pre-9/11, was sometimes numbered
— will utter bland, forgettable stuff. The inspired —
Bush after 9/11 — will be inspiring.
Does our strategy
match our words? At moments it has looked as if we were collecting
coalitions for their own sake, and dropping bombs in the Micawber-like
hope that something would turn up. The events of early November
in northern Afghanistan gave the lie to these reasonable worries.
With support from the air and from special forces, the Northern
Alliance, hitherto feeble and divided, has swept into almost every
major northern town, including Kabul, the capital. The Taliban,
which fled many positions without a fight, imagines that it is making
a strategic retreat, and it may well counterattack. But its own
commanders have begun to defect, making the universal obeisance
to success. (Treachery, in this as in other tribal warrior societies,
is not shameful: The warrior is the judge of his own honor, and
so long as he is brave, it does not matter which side he is brave
on.) The victories give the United States and its allies important
bases hundreds of miles closer to the remaining fields of action,
immeasurably improving our prospects for winter and spring.
The president
and his planners say that Afghanistan is only Phase One of this
war. Even Osama bin Laden, whose humiliation and death is one of
our prime war aims, is only a pustule on the diseased body of the
Middle East. After Afghanistan comes Iraq, which has been nursing
its grievances and building germ and atomic weapons for ten years.
After it comes Saudi Arabia, which, with its mysterious and
still unexplained bin Laden connections, is the financial reservoir
for terror. The Saudi royal family must understand that their days
of indolence and irresponsibility are over. Whether they can transform
themselves into competent rulers and reliable friends remains to
be seen. In the meantime, we must rely more heavily on oil from
the former Soviet Union and from our own reserves. Important sideline
players may change sides — Pakistan may turn against us; Iran,
whose Gorbachev-like President Khatami hopes to manage a sullen
populace, may turn toward us.
There is a
lot of work, sorrow, and nasty surprises ahead. In the short run,
our enemies will try to embarrass us with the squabbles and disorder
that will surely attend the successes of our native allies. All
the more important that we tell the world, and never forget, how
the people of northern Afghanistan greeted their liberation. A child
in Kabul flew a kite (banned under the Taliban fanatics). Men shaved
off their beards, and women took off their head-to-toe burqas (required
by the Taliban). Restaurateurs and ordinary citizens played music,
and dug up buried televisions and VCRs. "All the restrictions,
on television, on shaving, on women," one shopkeeper told the
New York Times. "The Koran says nothing about such things.
The Taliban people are a bunch of illiterates." Such scenes
remind us that, contrary to the despots and the holy killers, and
to our own multiculturalists, we are not arrayed against an opaque
and monolithic Other. Many people in the world wish our destruction,
and their leaders certainly wish their own advantage. But many more
retain the ordinary human desires that every decent political system
seeks to satisfy and manage, and that every religion worthy of the
name hopes to instruct and redeem. When the Taliban's fellow tyrants
fall, there will be dancing in the streets.
|
