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surrender of an enemy has never looked so bad. In fact, this may
be the first war in which an enemy's surrender has, in some respects,
made it harder for an army to achieve its goal.
No wonder Americans
on the ground have been discouraging the Eastern Alliance from accepting
any surrender in Tora Bora, as the Washington Post recounts
today in another excellent dispatch from Afghanistan.
The war in
Afghanistan has never been primarily about winning territory. Territorial
gains have been a means toward the real end: killing the top ranks
of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Surrender, of course, has its uses. It has provided the important
psychological boost of a string of demonstrable victories on the
ground; it has toppled the Taliban government; and it has, we hope,
drastically reduced the area in which bin Laden can hide.
Wonderful things
all. But surrender has its limits as well.
A surrender
laid the predicate for perhaps the most vicious fighting of the
war, and the only American battlefield casualty at the hands of
the Taliban: The hard-core Taliban plainly surrendered Kunduz with
a double-cross prison riot in mind from the beginning, which they
carried out in Mazar-e Sharif.
That riot is
a metaphor for what the toughest al Qaeda fighters hope to gain
by surrendering: the chance to fight another day, if not in Afghanistan,
then in Chechnya or Tajikistan or wherever they infiltrate next.
This was clearly
also the point of the surrender of Khandahar, which may have saved
Mullah Omar's skin — at least temporarily — and allowed
hundreds of Taliban fighters to head for the hills. (We would have
been better off if negotiations there had stalled for, say, a week
more.)
It would certainly
be the point of a surrender of Tora Bora too. It has clearly been
the point of surrender negotiations in Tora Bora, which have
allowed al Qaeda fighters to escape to Pakistan.
The Afghan
fighters allied with us on the ground seem unconcerned. "It's
not good manners to stop a cease-fire," one field commander
told the Post.
Not good manners.
This is really the nub of the problem. We are experiencing a cultural
conflict between the Eastern way of war, which tends to be a constant
negotiation toward surrender or betrayal, and the Western way, which
involves clashing armies directly confronting and attempting to
kill one another.
On the ground
in Afghanistan, we can't, of course, refuse to accept surrendering
soldiers. If al Qaeda troops want to wave white flags and walk toward
Eastern Alliance front lines, so be it.
But we shouldn't
make it easier for them. There should be no negotiations, just one
choice — B-52 strikes or your hands in the air.
And we should
prefer the B-52 option. The al Qaeda holed up in the White Mountains
have voted with their feet. Their presence there proves that they
are the true believers, they are the fanatics who will only kill
elsewhere if they escape, they are the army that crushed and incinerated
thousands of Americans on September 11.
The more of
them we kill, the better.
Sherman in
the Civil War realized that there would never be peace until the
roughly 20,000 hard-core Confederate warriors who were the young,
brave heart of the Confederacy were killed.
Exactly such
a task confronts us today. Please, no more surrenders.
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