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 t
is hard to imagine a starker demonstration of the bankruptcy of
"international opinion" than the current handwringing
over collateral damage from the U.S. attacks in Afghanistan. The
Afghan civilian casualties — which may be in the dozens or,
if you believe the Taliban, in the hundreds — are taken as
an indictment of the U.S. campaign, a sign that we are no better
than the terrorists (the Washington Post has a long front-page
piece today detailing such nonsensical views from around the world).
The idea behind
this sort of thinking is that everything is our fault: We
started the war, and therefore everything bad that comes from it
is our responsibility. Of course, it's the other way around: They
started the war, and the inevitable unfortunate consequences —
such as civilian casualties — are on the heads of Osama bin
Laden and the Taliban. But critics of the U.S. campaign have trouble
grasping this, because they have trouble ever recognizing the perfidy
of our enemies.
To the extent
this view holds in the West, it is essentially a suicidal impulse.
Followed to its logical conclusion, it would make it impossible
for us ever to defend ourselves and ever to fight for a flawed,
but morally superior goal against an evil enemy — because the
evil of our enemy never actually registers with anyone. This is
what happened in Vietnam, when Western outrage was focused on U.S.
napalm runs rather than on the murderous and oppressive character
of our enemy. The same thinking is beginning to take hold now, which
is why President Bush yesterday desperately tried to remind the
Europeans of the nature of al Qaeda and the Taliban.
If anything,
President Bush was too soft. The Taliban are the Khmer Rouge in
turbans, evil and ignorance meeting in a toxic stew to destroy a
nation. Let's put aside the Taliban's years-long war against U.N.
humanitarian aid, their efforts now to use civilians as shields,
their use of mosques to hide their weapons — and dwell instead,
as a way to focus the mind, on the particular, on just one instance
of the Taliban in action.
In his indispensable
book,
Taliban, Ahmed Rashid describes what happened after the
Taliban took back the town of Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, after having
lost it the year before: "What followed was another brutal
massacre, genocidal in its ferocity, as the Taliban took revenge
on their losses the previous year. A Taliban commander later said
that Mullah Omar had given them permission to kill for two hours,
but they had killed for two days. The Taliban went on a killing
frenzy, driving their pickups up and down the narrow streets of
Mazar shooting to the left and right and killing everything that
moved — shop owners, cart pullers, women and children shoppers
and even goats and donkeys."
This is the
Taliban we are supposed to spare during the month of Ramadan, for
religious (!) reasons. Rashid continues: "Contrary to all injunctions
of Islam, which demands immediate burial, bodies were left to rot
on the streets. 'They were shooting without warning at everybody
who happened to be on the street, without discriminating between
men, women and children. Soon the streets were covered with dead
bodies and blood. No one was allowed to bury the corpses for the
first six days. Dogs were eating human flesh and going mad and soon
the smell became intolerable,' said a male Tajik who managed to
escape the massacre."
The Persian-speaking
Hazara, who are also Shiites and therefore hated by the Sunni Taliban,
had dealt the Taliban their initial setback in Mazar. Rashid continues:
"As people ran for shelter to their homes, Taliban soldiers
barged in and massacred Hazara households wholesale. 'People were
shot three times on the spot, one bullet in the head, one in the
chest and one in the testicles. Those who survived buried their
dead in their gardens. Women were raped,' said the same witness.
'When the Taliban stormed into our house they shot my husband and
two brothers dead on the spot. Each was shot three times and then
their throats were slit in the halal way,' said a 40-year-old
Tajik widow."
The Taliban
had guides to take them to the homes of Hazara, but decided not
to be so discriminating. Rashid: "[T]he Taliban were out of
control and arbitrary killings continued, even of those who were
not Hazaras. 'I saw that a young Tajik boy had been killed —
the Talib was still standing there and the father was crying.
"Why have you killed my son? We are Tajiks." The Talib
responded, "Why didn't you say so?" And the father said,
"Did you ask that I could answer?"'"
Sometimes the
Taliban were more deliberate about their killing: "Thousands
of Hazaras were taken to Mazar jail and when it was full, they were
dumped in containers which were locked and the prisoners allowed
to suffocate. Some containers were taken to the Dasht-e-Laili desert
outside Mazar and the inmates massacred there — in direct retaliation
for the similar treatment meted out to the Taliban in 1997. 'They
brought three containers from Mazar to Shiberghan. When they opened
the door of one truck, only three persons were alive. About 300
were dead. The three were taken to the jail. I could see all this
from where I was sitting,' said another witness."
And, finally,
the Taliban tried to be thorough: "As tens of thousands of
civilians tried to escape Mazar by foot in long columns over the
next few days, the Taliban killed dozens more in aerial bombardments."
This is our
enemy. This is the regime that is now garnering international sympathy
by complaining of civilian casualties. This is the army we are supposed
to stop bombing for a full month. This is the Taliban. If we can't
bomb them with alacrity and a good, clean conscience, we can't bomb
anyone.
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