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  hat's
the sense of sending $2 million missiles to hit a $10 tent that's
empty?" President Bush asked in the days after September 11.
An excellent
question.
Maybe the tents
have been spared, but American bombs and missiles have been hitting
a lot of empty warehouses and concrete bunkers in Afghanistan. Assuming
the real-estate market is still depressed there and warehouse space
isn't particularly valuable, this is not a very cost-conscious way
to wage war, let alone a way to win one.
It had seemed
in recent days that the administration had finally faced up to the
fact that this war — despite all the complicated political
questions involved — requires destroying the Taliban, which
in turn means hitting their front-line troops.
But in the
Washington Post this morning, Thomas Ricks reports that the
administration has decided to bomb the front-line troops only very
gingerly. That "straddle" I
wrote about two weeks ago appears to live on: the Bushies can't
decide whether to temporarily throw in with the Northern Alliance
or not.
And so, the
administration appears to be calibrating its bombing campaign with
an excruciating preciousness.
At this point,
the administration's attitude should clearly be: "We'd like
to have a political solution in place for post-Taliban Afghanistan.
We probably should have thought about it sooner and harder. But
we're just not going to be able to figure it out in the midst of
a war. Bombs away."
The most disturbing
bit in the Ricks story is a statement from Air Force General Richard
B. Myers, who explains that "This is a different kind of conflict.
The closest analogy would be the drug war."
This is not
very comforting. Put aside the fact that the drug war can't be won.
The truly disturbing thing is that much of the drug war depends
on hokum, including the notion that certain policies are important,
not on their merits, but in the way that they send "signals"
to potential users of drugs.
The U.S. has
been engaged in just such signal-sending in Afghanistan. The public
justification — let's hope it's just a ruse — for last
weekend's special-operations raid is that the demonstration of our
ability to insert ourselves into southern Afghanistan will signal
potential Pashtun rebels that we can get them supplies should they
need them.
The idea that
some budding southern warlord is going to make his decision about
whether to revolt on the basis of this signal — on the basis
of a raid that apparently killed no one and lasted just a few hours
— seems absurd. The only thing that will prompt mass defections
and betrayals in Afghanistan will be the destruction of the Taliban.
It's well past
time to get on with it in earnest.
Wars usually
take on a logic of their own, and sooner or later the administration
will have to bow to the logic of this one. Not only will the bombing
have to intensify, but if seizing control of Mazar-e Sharif is as
important as it is portrayed, and the Northern Alliance can't manage
it, the possibility of U.S. ground troops themselves taking on such
a discrete mission will deserve consideration.
The only signal
that will ultimately resonate in Afghanistan is the one that is
sent with dead Taliban.
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